Re: [PATCH 4/5] interpret-trailers: add an option to normalize output

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 11:35:00AM -0700, Stefan Beller wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 1:03 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> > The point of "--only-trailers" is to give a caller an output
> > that's easy for them to parse. Getting rid of the
> > non-trailer material helps, but we still may see more
> > complicated syntax like whitespace continuation. Let's add
> > an option to normalize the output into one "key: value" line
> > per trailer.
> >
> > As a bonus, this could be used even without --only-trailers
> > to clean up unusual formatting in the incoming data.
> 
> This is useful for the parsing part, but for the writing part we'd
> rather want to have the opposite thing, such as
> '--line-break=rfc822'. But this doesn't have to be part of this
> series. With this in mind, I do not quite understand the latter
> use case how you would use normalized trailers without
> --only-trailers?

If you prefer the normalized form (and the input was line-broken in a
way that you don't like), then this would convert to your preferred
form. I agree that you could potentially want the opposite (folding long
lines). Perhaps something like --wrap=72.

-Peff