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Comment by schwede | Hacker News Reader

Why does the commit editor hide the coauthored message? Why not pre-populate the text field and users take or leave it when committing?

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I think this is a good point - perhaps there should be some commit-time UI which would let the user make the choice. Thanks for the suggestion!

Co-Authored-By is normally a trailer, and trailers aren’t part of the commit message. It’s likely the commit editor isn’t set up to show trailers. They’re not exactly obscure, but it does seem that they’re relatively unknown.

What do you mean they aren’t part of the commit message? Trailers like (signed off by) are absolutely part of the message. Tools can choose to treat them as special metadata, but they’re part of the commit.

The docs for the function to interpret trailers even says this explicitly: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers

> Add or parse structured information in commit messages

I mean that they’re not necessarily part of the --message parameter to `git commit`, but instead part of the --trailer parameter. I don’t know how VSCode is programmed, but it seems plausible that trailers are handled separately from the message parameter.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit

We're talking about Git here. The question is not "how VSCode is programmed", the question is "does Git have a special field for commit trailers". The answer is no. Git stores the trailer as part of the commit message.

If you look at the comment I’m responding to, it is in fact about how VSCode is programmed; specifically, a possible reason why the Co-Authored-By trailer doesn’t show up in VSCode’s commit message box.

It seems like it would be most reasonable to consider porcelain vs. plumbing command details in deciding if something is logically distinct to Git. git-commit has --message and --trailer options, git-commit-tree has a --message option. I take that as trailer is a convenience option to provide a consistent way to append those details to the commit message. But that doesn't mean it's not part of the commit message, nor that the user shouldn't see it while reviewing the commit message.

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