[PATCH v3 0/1] git-multimail: a replacement for post-receive-email

This is the third iteration of submitting git-multimail to Git. The first pass [1] was a modest trial balloon, proposing to add a new script to live alongside post-receive-email. Following feedback [2] from the mailing list, I decided to make the script a full replacement for post-receive-email (and renamed it from post-receive-multimail.py to git-multimail). The second pass [3] was an RFC that generated a lot of useful feedback, some requests for better support of old features (mostly implemented), and some contributions by other members of the community (especially Matthieu Moy). The overall reaction to git-multimail as a replacement for post-receive-email has been quite positive.

Now I believe that git-multimail is ripe for inclusion in contrib. Its features are documented in the README file and its advantages over post-receive-email are documented in the file README.migrate-from-post-receive-email.

This series consists of a single patch that adds a directory contrib/hooks/git-multimail/ containing five files, described in the patch's commit message. It does *not* deprecate post-receive-email, let alone remove it, though I hope that both of those steps will be warranted in time.

If there is consensus that git-multimail should be integrated into the Git project, there are some logistical issues that need to be discussed:

* Code drop versus merge?

  * The first 170 commits to git-multimerge took place in a private
    repository, commingled with other material.  All of these commits
    were by me.  I don't have time to sanitize these commits into a
    publishable history, so I'm afraid that part of the history will
    never become public.

  * The subsequent 200 commits of the history have been published to
    GitHub [4].  (The version that I am submitting corresponds to the
    git-multimail subtree of revision
    c06a1af5d3a9dfbac7eb704dc8e15a2aee60a334 of that repository.)
    These commits are reasonably clean, though definitely not up to
    the usual Git project standards.  The first of these commits
    consists of a code drop from the private repository just
    mentioned.  The recent part of this history includes commits by
    other authors.

  Would it be preferable to merge the last 200 commits of the
  git-multimail history into the Git project (presumably via subtree
  merge), or just to incorporate it as a single, squashed patch?

* What to include?  The GitHub repo contains some infrastructure
  outside of the git-multimail directory, which is not included in
  this patch series:

      .gitignore, COPYING -- redundant with the Git project's
          top-level files.

      MANIFEST.in, setup.py -- infrastructure for Python's setuptools
          (to allow git-multimail to be packaged as a Python module,
          probably irrelevant in the context of the Git project.

      README -- a symlink to git-multimail/README.

      t/ -- some crude scripts and data that I have been using for
          testing.  The tests are largely manual, so it is not clear
          whether they would be helpful within the Git project.

      notes.txt -- TODO list etc.

* How to organize future development?  Directly in the Git repo, using
  the git mailing list, etc?  As a fork of the Git project that
  occasionally issues patches and/or pull requests to the main
  project?  Or as a separate project that does not include the whole
  Git tree, which is occasionally merged back to the Git project using
  subtree merge?

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/201433 [2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/201471 [3] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/214686 [4] https://github.com/mhagger/git-multimail

Michael Haggerty (1):
  git-multimail: a replacement for post-receive-email

 contrib/hooks/git-multimail/README                 |  410 ++++
 .../README.migrate-from-post-receive-email         |  146 ++
 contrib/hooks/git-multimail/git_multimail.py       | 2126 ++++++++++++++++++++
 .../hooks/git-multimail/migrate-mailhook-config    |  270 +++
 contrib/hooks/git-multimail/post-receive           |   66 +
 5 files changed, 3018 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 contrib/hooks/git-multimail/README
 create mode 100644 contrib/hooks/git-multimail/README.migrate-from-post-receive-email
 create mode 100755 contrib/hooks/git-multimail/git_multimail.py
 create mode 100755 contrib/hooks/git-multimail/migrate-mailhook-config
 create mode 100755 contrib/hooks/git-multimail/post-receive