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

On 09/02/2016 07:23 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jonathan Tan [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

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.