Sponsored-By Proposal | Hacker News Reader

Sponsored-By Proposal

blog.liw.fi

41 pointsedward14 comments

I believe Git normally refers to these things as "trailers" [0], which seems more accurate since they usually (always?) Follow the commit message rather than preceding it.

[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers

The name and format matches HTTP trailers which are also a thing (though no one uses them).

Good idea. I'm adding your idea now to my open source git commit template: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/git-commit-template

What you're suggesting is essentially a "git trailer". A trailer can be automatically parsed by git (and related tools) and needs to be at the end of the message.

The template above explains more about trailers, such as "See:" which can help documentation systems (such as a link to an issue tracker) and "Co-authored-by:" which can help social coding systems (such as a GitHub/GitLab username or email address).

Note that the de-facto existing standard (FreeBSD) doesn't have the hyphen. If these are intended to be read by tooling, it's probably best to keep consistency with existing practice, even though every other trailer seems to be hyphenated. (The Git software can cope with spaces in trailer names.)

> This is a new idea, and has barely been tried. What do you think?

As the author later pointed out: it's not a new idea, FreeBSD has been doing it for decades. Nevertheless, I agree it deserves broader uses.

I will be applying this to a lot of commits from the past and in the future!

Makes sense to have these trailers as something thats parsable some point in the future.

Seeing as the existing use is without the hyphen, shouldn't this proposal be updated to match?

Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson

The biggest oops we're stuck with is the Referer HTTP header. At least that one was intentional.

Intentional? Really?

I was confused by your comment, but I am betting you parsed "that one" as the referer situation; I am quite confident it referred to the creat situation.

Yes. My understanding is that `creat` was intentional due to early limits on variable names `O_CREAT` is 8 characters (7 + null), but `Referer` was an accident. So parsing the parent comment as saying `Referer` was intentional confused me. “Why would you intentionally misspell that?”

Right, but that was unlikely to be the correct parse as we don't normally use phrasing like that; we say "well, you might think X is Y, just let me tell you Z is actually way more Y... at least in your Z situation, A is true, which mitigates how Y it could be". There was a lot elided here, but the structure was the same.

He finally did [0]!

[0]: https://github.com/golang/go/commit/c90d392ce3d3203e0c32b3f9...

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