[systemd-devel] systemctl edit TODO item

[Daniele Nicolodi]

On 18/03/15 13:57, Ronny Chevalier wrote:
> 2015-03-18 13:39 GMT+01:00 Daniele Nicolodi <daniele at grinta.net>:
>> On 18/03/15 10:09, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
>>> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 12:13:39PM +0100, Ronny Chevalier wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> About the TODO item of systemctl edit:
>>>> "Upon editor exit, lines with one # are removed, lines with two # are
>>>> left with one #, etc."
>>>>
>>>> I don't really agree, because if you have some comments in your
>>>> drop-in file, you will have to remember every time you edit it to
>>>> prepend one # to each one of your comments if you don't want them to
>>>> be removed.
>>> The idea was to prepend all existing comments with an extra hash.
>>> Then lines with a single hash can be used without conflicting with
>>> existing comments and the old comments can be restored exactly to their
>>> previous form after editing is done.
>>
>> Wouldn't it be easy to prefix the lines to remove with something else
>> than a hash or anything else that can be valid content for the file that
>> is being edited, or that generally is much less likely to be present in
>> the original file?
>>
>> For example mercurial uses the "HG: " prefix for lines that are removed
>> from the commit message template file.
> 
> Using # makes editors highlight the lines as comments without having
> to deal with a new systemd specific format for comments.
> 
> With your suggestion, when editing a file we will not see the specific
> lines prefixed as comments.
> 
> I think keeping the # as prefix is better here.

I didn't say that hashes are a bad idea, I was just suggesting to use
something more unique than a certain number of hash prefix.  For
example, a prefix like "# SYSTEMD: " is fairly unlikely to be in the
original content of the file, is easily recognizable, and parses as a
comment.

Cheers,
Daniele