Re: [PATCH 3/3] notes: don't indent empty lines

On Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 1:10 PM Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Eric Sunshine [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Like other Git commands, `git notes` takes care to call `stripspace` on
the user-supplied note content, thereby ensuring that it has no trailing
whitespace, among other cleanups. However, when notes are inserted into
a patch via `git format-patch --notes`, all lines of the note are
indented unconditionally, including empty lines, which leaves trailing
whitespace on lines which previously were empty, thus negating the
normalization done earlier. Fix this shortcoming.

Playing the devil's advocate, it can be argued that using the same
leading whitespace on a paragraph break line is actually a good
thing.  Leaving them in would give the consumer an easy way to see
which part was inserted from a note.

The, um, angel's response: `git format-patch --notes` is a convenience
for the _submitter_ of a series. It is difficult to imagine a
scenario[1] in which the _consumer_ of a series would care or need to
know whether patch commentary was written by hand, inserted
mechanically (by `--notes`), or inserted mechanically and then
hand-edited.

The trailing whitespace is unusual within the Git sphere, as well as
unsightly if you happen to have your editor configured to highlight
trailing whitespace, and just "feels" sloppy.

[1]: I suppose mechanical extraction of notes may be one such
scenario, allowing for simple-minded (not necessarily robust)
extraction mechanics; i.e. start extracting after the /^Notes:$/ line
and stop at the first line not indented with four blanks.