Re: [RFC/PATCH 0/2] place cherry pick line below commit title

[Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>]

On 10/03/2016 12:17 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> It may be necessary for the code to analize the lines in a block
> identified as "likely to be a trailing block" more carefully,
> though.  The example 59f0aa94 in the message you are responding to
> has "Link 1:" that consists of 3 physical lines.  An instruction to
> interpret-trailers to add a new one _after_ "Link-$n:" may have to
> treat these as a single logical line and do the addition after them,
> i.e. before "Link 2:" line, for example.
>
> I also saw
>
> 	Signed-off-by: Some body <some@body.xz> (some comment
>         that extends to the next line without being indented)
> 	Sined-off-by: Some body Else <some.body@else.xz>
>
> where the only clue that the second line is logically a part of the
> first one was the balancing of parentheses (or [brakets]).  To
> accomodate real-world use cases, you may have to take into account a
> lot more than the strict rfc-822 style "line folding".

If we define a logical trailer line as the set of physical lines until 
the next trailer line...it is true that this has some precedence in that 
such lines can be written (although this might not be intentional):

   $ git interpret-trailers --trailer "a=foo
   bar" </dev/null

   a: foo
   bar

This solves the "Line 1:" case above, but raises other issues:

1. Checking for existence (trailer.ifexists) is now conceptually more 
difficult. For example, handling of inner whitespace in between lines 
might be confusing (currently, there is only one line, and whitespace 
handling is clearly described).
2. Replacement (trailer.ifexists=replace) might replace more than expected.
3. There is a corner case - the first line might not be a trailer line. 
Even if interpret-trailers knew about "(cherry picked from", a user 
might enter something else there. (We could just declare such blocks as 
non-trailers, but if we are already loosening the definition of a 
trailer, this might be something that we should allow.)

My initial thought was to think of a trailer as a block of trailer lines 
possibly interspersed with other lines. This leads to interpret-trailers 
placing the trailer in the wrong place if trailer.where=after, as you 
describe, but this might not be a big problem if trailer.where=after is 
not widely used (and it is not the default). (The other options behave 
as expected.)

There are other options like checking for indentation or checking for 
balanced parentheses/brackets, but I think that these would lead to 
surprising behavior for the user (this would mean that whitespace or 
certain characters could turn a valid trailer into an invalid one or 
vice versa, or change the behavior of trailer.ifexists, especially 
"replace").