Re: Parsing trailers

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 02:41:20PM -0800, William Chargin wrote:

I'm interested in parsing the output of `git-interpret-trailers` in a
script. I had hoped that the `--parse` option would make this easy, but
it seems that the `trailer.separators` configuration option is used to
specify both the input format (which separators may indicate a trailer)
and the output format of `git interpret-trailers --parse`. Given that
`trailer.separators` may contain any (non-NUL) characters, including
whitespace, parsing the output is not straightforward.

IMHO this is a bug in --parse. It was always meant to give sane,
normalized output, that you could parse with something like:

  [^:]+: .*

That's what "%(trailers:only)" does (even if the original separator was
something else). It also trims any extra whitespace.

So I think it would be reasonable to:

  1. Add an --output-separator option. This should be uncontroversial.

  2. Make --parse imply "--output-separator=:". This might be more
     controversial, because it does change the output. But as I said
     above, I consider the current behavior to simply be a bug.

  3. (Optional) Add a "-z" option which uses "\0" both
     within and between trailer records. This obviously solves your
     problem without steps 1 and 2, but I think we should have a way to
     do it without relying on NULs, since they're harder to work with in
     some tools.

-Peff