alt Hacker News> This wouldn't be an issue if patches were XML or JSON with a well defined schema, but everything must be a boutique undocumented format in the world of Unix tools.
Patch files are readable by humans. Replacing them with XML or JSON would fix this problem, but at the expense of removing a core feature.
If, by "readable by humans", you mean "it would reliably fool humans as well", I'd say it's an ambiguity bug regardless of whether it's "a core feature" or not. A patch format, human-readable or not, should clearly indicate which part is the commit message and which part is an actual diff; it's not the case here.