Change in behavior: Text after --- now deleted

[gwd]

When doing email-based development, it's not uncommon to put things after a --- line which you want to be in the patchbombed email, but not in the final commit. For instance:

Frob the googleblarf

<description>

Signed-off-by: Joe Smith <joe@smith.com>
---
I thought about blarfing the googlefrob as well; let me know if that's desired.

CC: Amanda Hug <hugz@gmail.com>
CC: Tom Thumb <tiny@carrot.net>

In this case there's a comment to reviewers, as well as people to automatically CC when sending the mail, none of which you want to be committed; because git am will automatically strip it.

It used to be that you could add this when doing a stg refresh, and it would remain; but now anything like that seems to be deleted on refresh -- making stackgit much less useful for email-based workflows.

$ stg version
Stacked Git 2.0.4
Copyright (C) 2005-2022 StGit authors
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-only
git version 2.38.1

[jpgrayson]

Thank you for this issue report, @gwd. Much appreciated.

Here's what I've found from a quick, initial triage:

StGit 1.5

• stg edit -> --- in message works
• stg edit -d -> --- is not captured in message
• stg new -> --- in message works
• stg new -v -> --- in message works

StGit 2.0

• stg edit -> --- is not captured in message
• stg edit -d -> --- is not captured in message
• stg new -> --- is not captured in message
• stg new -d -> --- is not captured in message

So it seems like a --- line and subsequent lines could be part of patch message in StGit 1.x, except with stg edit -d where the --- was used to separate the message from the diff. And in StGit 2.0, a --- line is always used to separate the diff from the message body.

I agree that this is a significant regression and needs to be fixed. I'm thinking the solution will be to use a comment-based separator (e.g. # ----- >8 -----) instead of --- to separate the patch message from the diff. There is precedence for this in git commit --verbose and stg new --verbose in StGit 1.x. Need to be careful to still respect --- as a separator in stg import though.

[gwd]

Amazing, thanks all!