On Wed, Feb 11, 2026, at 08:47, Jeff King wrote:

On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 06:34:05PM -0800, Jacob Keller wrote:

quoted

quoted

Hmm. If we add a new unambiguous marker after the ---, old versions
would see '...' and know to cut the description. New versions would
wait for <NEW MARKER> and properly ignore any diff/etc prior to this.

Since <NEW MARKER> is after a ---, it would be ignored and not
inserted as part of the commit message, and because all versions
universally accept cruft between --- and the diff start, this should
be acceptable right?

Keeping in mind we'd have to use <NEW MARKER> as something that we
somehow reject as being a valid part of a commit message somehow, so
that you can't accidentally insert it, and we'd need to be careful
about rejecting formatting such a patch, and probably complaining on
the receiving end if we see multiple markers.. Trickier than it sounds
I imagine.

Yeah, on reading your first message, I wondered if we would run into a
commit message adding "---" followed by the new marker. If the new
marker is forbidden, I guess that works. But how ugly is that new marker
going to be, then? ;) We'll now see it in every email.

Maybe it could be something like `<symbols><space>`? It’s difficult to accidentally 
get a trailing whitespace into a commit.

If we are going to modify what format-patch produces, I'd be more
inclined to have it perform some reversible quoting on the commit
message so that "---" and "diff" lines are not recognized. And then that
quoting only has to kick in when a message would be ambiguous, so most
people wouldn't even see it.

This sounds better anyway.

[snip]