Fix #6276: "Show messages of annotated tags" truncates to ten lines without notice

[lhiginbotham]

Fixes #6276: "Show messages of annotated tags" truncates to ten lines without notice

Proposed changes

• use git cat-file -p <tag name> to get full tag message, preventing the previous 10 line limitation

Screenshots

Before

After

Test methodology

Tested the following scenarios:

• a non-annotated tag (result: no special treatment, tag name does not show in commit message area)
• a tag with new line characters only (result: same as non-annotated tag)
• a tag with a null message (result: name appears, no message)
• a tag with varying numbers of new lines between lines of text (result: multiple new lines condense into a single new line, message shows)
• a tag with more than ten lines of text (result: all lines of text appear)

Test environment(s)

• GIT 2.33.0.windows.1
• Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.19042.0

Merge strategy

I agree that the maintainer squash merge this PR (if the commit message is clear).

---

✒️ I contribute this code under The Developer Certificate of Origin.

[RussKie]

👍
Do you think you could add an non-UI integration a unit test to GitCommands.Tests (i.e. with ReferenceRepository)?

[gerhardol]

Long captions are truncated to not overflow the user with information. There has been several changes to limit commit messages in various tooltips for instance.
If number of branches exceeds 10, they are limited in the commit info.

This goes the other way. It could be done as "add ore info" too.
Or just add a comment like: No check for length, also displaying very long annotation messages

[lhiginbotham]

@mstv, you said:

Long captions are truncated to not overflow the user with information. There has been several changes to limit commit messages in various tooltips for instance. If number of branches exceeds 10, they are limited in the commit info.

This goes the other way. It could be done as "add [m]ore info" too. Or just add a comment like: No check for length, also displaying very long annotation messages

Sorry, but are you meaning that I must add a comment in the code to warn devs that we are allowing for potentially large annotation messages..? Or are you suggesting I expose an option to the user to either display a truncated message (probably with an ellipsis at the end [...]) vs the full annotation message?

Or are you suggesting nothing at all, just making a general observation for everyone's information?

Edit: @gerhardol said this, sorry!!

[lhiginbotham]

@RussKie I wrote the tests that you have asked for. They helped me catch the fact that I was accidentally appending an extraneous new line character on the end of the GetTagMessage string! (Due to calling AppendLine on all message rather than on all except the last, where Append would have been more appropriate for the last message line).

I left a note saying that we should put in "sad-path" tests to test things like if GetTagMessage is passed a non-tag reference, but doing so would require some refactoring, which might be better left for a separate refactoring issue where we can attempt to generalize GetTagMessage into something like GetObjectMessage (if this is even necessary, seeing as there is already logic somewhere for rendering commit message bodies; at the very least, we can put a return null; if GetTagMessage is passed a non-tag ref).

If you are fine with leaving things as-is, this PR should be good to go!

[lhiginbotham]

@RussKie are there any pending items on this PR?

[RussKie]

I'd like to get @gerhardol sign off

[gerhardol]

The info is only shown in commit info, not in tooltips what I see, so the change should be fine.