Re: git-interpret-trailers and period characters in the key

[Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 1, 2025 at 3:27 PM Brendan Jackman <jackmanb@google.com> wrote:

> Basically, as soon as any trailer key contains a period (which in my
> case, it does because the trailer keys refer to versions of of
> software, i.e. "this commit was backported from the following Linux
> kernel commit which appeared in version 6.1"), it stops parsing the
> trailer block.
>
> My guess is that this is just that it doesn't allow periods in the
> trailer key, and once there's one line in the block that isn't a
> trailer, it no longer meets the requirements described in the man
> page.

Yeah, it's also my guess that the trailer block is not considered a
trailer block anymore as your trailer key is not considered a valid
trailer key.

> I can't find anything in the man page about why the period character
> should break this. Am I missing anything there?

We tried to be quite strict when implementing trailers to avoid
regular text to be too easily considered trailers.

Having a config option or something to be a bit more lenient and
accept more characters in trailer keys could help some people, and it
might not be very difficult to implement. On the other hand if people
start to have a lot of weird trailers around, and abuse the config
option to make it too lenient, then it could be a bad thing in general
as more and more regular text might be interpreted as trailers.

I also agree that our doc about this could be improved. Patches welcome.

Best,
Christian.