Re: git am and the wrong chunk of ---

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

If I understand your issue, somebody is writing:


    From: them
    To: you
    Date: ...
    Subject: [PATCH] subject line

    commit message body
    ....

    some cover letter material that should go below the "---"
    ---
      [diffstat + diff]

How do you know when the commit message body ends, and the cover letter
begins? We already have two machine-readable formats for separating the
two ("---" after the commit message, and "-- >8 --" scissors before). Is
there some machine-readable hint? Is it always the paragraph before the
"---"? Chopping that off unconditionally seems like a dangerous
heuristic.

Or it could be like this:

    ...
    Subject: [PATCH] patch title

    Heya,

    I was walking my dog when I found a solution to this
    problem the other day.  Here it is.

    commit message body

    S-o-b: ...
    ---

And I agree that clever heuristics are dangerous.  We need to draw a
line somewhere anyway, and the line should be at the place that is
easily understandable to people.  That means mechanically parseable
and easy to follow convention to use markers e.g. "---".