Re: Mistakes in commit log messages

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 4/11/2023 7:01 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>   
> +  /^\* [a-zA-Z0-9_.~#-]/ {
> +    nfiles++
> +    if ((rc = (getline x < $2)) < 0) {
> +      status = 1
> +      print "File " $2 " cannot be read: [" ERRNO "]"
> +    }
> +    close($2)
> +  }

One thing to be careful of here (which is why I did the 'match'/'substr' 
dance in my patch) is that we need to be able to handle lines like this 
correctly:

   * some/file.el: New file.

Normally, awk would split that so that $2 is "some/file.el:", which 
isn't right. Maybe there's a better method than my patch though. I'm 
definitely not an awk expert (this is the first awk code I've ever written).

Also, using 'getline' will work for checking files, but not directories. 
I'm not sure this ever comes up in practice, but it might occur once in 
a while if we import a large package into the Emacs tree. We could do a 
bit of feature-checking and upgrade to using 'stat' if we have a newish 
gawk. That way, gawk users would get proper checks for this (rare) case. 
(This might not be strictly necessary.)

Finally, I think it would make sense to have this be a purely advisory 
warning for now so that we could check it into the Emacs tree soon-ish. 
As Eli suggests, we can try running with this hook locally, but since 
I've already added some Lisp code to generate the changelog for my 
workflow, I'm probably never going to trigger this myself. If this check 
is just a warning, I think we could be a little more aggressive in 
merging this, since it shouldn't break anyone's workflows.