Re: Questions about trailer configuration semantics

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> It's inevitable that you'll have to do some data cleanup like that
> anyway. Lumping together prefixes isn't flexible enough to coverall
> cases. Using trailer.*.key to manually map names covers more, but again
> not all (e.g., if the project used to use "foo" but switched to "bar",
> but the syntax of the value fields also changed at the same time, you'd
> need to normalize those, too).
>
> So to me it boils down to:
>
>   - returning the data as verbatim as possible when reading existing
>     trailers would give the least surprise to most people
>
>   - real data collection is going to involve a separate post-processing
>     step which is better done in a full programming language

Yeah, I agree that these are good guidelines to use when we think
about the feature.

> The original %(trailers) was "dump the trailers block verbatim". But
> that's not super useful for parsing individual trailers. So "only"
> actually starts parsing the individual trailers. I'd argue that the
> %(trailers) behavior is correct, but that %(trailers:only) should
> probably be doing less (i.e., just parsing and reporting what it finds,
> but not changing any names).

Yes, sounds sensible.