Using "From" to start commit message

[Jeremy Kerr]

Hi Thierry,

> I've noticed something strange happening when a commit message starts
> with the word "From". When downloading the commit as mbox, I see that
> the line is "escaped" using a '>' character, which causes git am to
> ignore the line.
> 
> This can be seen in the following patch for example:
> 
> 	http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/330330/
> 
> I'm not familiar with the internals of patchwork, but I would expect
> this to be perfectly legal in a commit message. I could imagine that
> to be special treatment for From lines in mailboxes, but that should
> not apply to the text in commit messages.

Hm, interesting. This escaping is generally required for the file to be
a valid mbox; the 'From<space>' sequence defines the beginning of a new
message (hence the escaping with '>'), but it looks like this isn't what
git am expects.

We could generate the message without the escaping (and drop the initial
From_ line too), but that may break other uses of the mailbox files. I'm
not sure how many other consumers there are though...

Carl - I see you've done some work on git am's parser for From_ syntax;
do you know what's happening here?

Regards,


Jeremy