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

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> 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. "---".