Re: [PATCH] sequencer: support folding in rfc2822 footer

[Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>]

On 09/02/2016 07:23 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com> writes:
>
>> Sample-field: multiple-line field body
>>  that causes a blank line below
>
> I am not sure this is unconditionally good, or may cause problems to
> those with workflows you did not consider when you wrote this patch.
>
> Not being too lenient here historically has been a deliberate
> decision to avoid misidentification of non "footers".  Does Git
> itself produce some folded footer line?  If Git itself produced such
> folded lines, I'd be a lot more receptive to this change, but I do
> not think that is the case here.

I don't think Git produces any folded lines, but folded lines do appear 
in footers in projects that use Git. For example, some Android commits 
have multi-line "Test:" fields (example, [1]) and some Linux commits 
have multi-line "Tested-by:" fields (example, [2]).

Taking the Android commit as an example, this would mean that 
cherrypicking that commit would create a whole new footer, and tripping 
up tools (for example, Gerrit, which looks for "Change-Id:" in the last 
paragraph). But this would not happen if "Test:" was single-line instead 
of multi-line - which seems inconsistent.

[1] 
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/4c5281862f750cbc9d7355a07ef1a5545b9b3523
[2] 
https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable/+/69f92f67b68ab7028ffe15f0eea76b59f8859383

> A slightly related tangent.  An unconditionally good change you
> could make is to allow folding of in-body headers.  I.e. you can
> have e.g.
>
> 	-- >8 --
> 	Subject: [PATCH] sequencer: support in-body headers that are
>          folded according to RFC2822 rules
>
> 	The first paragraph after the above long title begins
> 	here...
>
> in the body of the msssage, and I _think_ we do not fold it properly
> when applying such a patch.  We should, as that is something that
> appears in format-patch output (i.e. something Git itself produces,
> unlike the folded "footer").

OK, I'll take a look at this.