Re: [PATCH 3/3] doc: give examples for send-email cc-cmd operation

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Jul 21, 2015, 22:48 UTC
Message-ID: <11647308F0684851A72DDF51A486D11D@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq615exwou.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>

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> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>
>>> I was trying to use, essentially, 'cat list.txt' as the command,...
>
> One thing that needs to be made clear is that I do not think we want
> to encourage `cat list.txt #` abuse in the first place.

OK [1]

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>   It is an
> unacceptable hack for us to encourage in the longer term.  It may
> happen to work with the current implementation, but it does so
> merely by depending on the implementation too much.
>
> If it is so common to want to spray all your patches to exactly the
> same list of recipients that is unconditionally determined, having

It wasn't 'unconditional spraying' ;-), rather I'd carefully select who to send to for each series, previously with multiple cc=".." on the command line.

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> multiple sendemail.cc configuration variables, which are cumulative,
> is already one way to do so, and you do not have to type such a long
> option "--cc-cmd='cat $filename'" every time.
>
> And if you do not want configuration for some reason, and having a
> list of addresses in a flat file is so common, we could have a new
> option "--cc-list=$filename" to support that use case.  I however
> doubt anything that starts with "First you make a list of addresses
> in a flat file, and then do this" is a good solution.

For a longer series, a list will still need collating by the OP somehow, but I don't think that alone would justify a new option.

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>
> I would think that it would probably be the best way to address "I
> often want to cc these recipients, but not always" is to keep a list
> of aliases, each entry of which expands to the recipients, and say
> "--cc=group" from the command line to have it expanded to the set of
> recipients.
>

[1] You mentioned in the previous email the script command argv[] array, which I hadn't heard of (for a script), having been used the $1, $2, method.

Given that new understanding, IIUC the proposal is that the garantee is the "--cc-cmd" should be a single command/script name, with the patchfilename passed as $1, and that a 'string string' for interpretation would now be deprecated.

I'll see about a shorter doc patch that restricts itself to just the base aspects, if that would be acceptable? -- Philip