Re: [RFC] series headers

From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Jul 10, 2007, 14:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20070710144808.GA27033@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0707101452250.4047@racer.site>

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 02:56:48PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> And what is so wrong with
> 
> [insert before format-patch] $EDITOR my-cover-letter.txt
> 
> [replace $EDITOR 0000-cover-letter.txt] $EDITOR my-cover-letter.txt 
> 	0000-cover-letter.patch
> 
> and paste the changed text?

Nothing is *wrong* with it per-se, but if you have multiple things that you are working on at the same-time, you might not want to keep 0000-cover-letter.patch in your working directory.

The simplest place to put it is in .git/patches/<branch> while I'm working with it using guilt (or the equivalent place in stgit), and if you include it in the series file then it becomes easier to hack it so that git-format-patches will create the cover letter for you. (And ideally, you would be able to use guilt to edit the cover letter using "guilt header -e cover-letter" but that feature hasn't been added yet; should be simple, though.)

Basically, the issue is of handling the cover letter as a first-class object, as opposed to something whic his manually handled via cut-and-paste. A lot of the tools are actually there already if you are using tools like guilt and stgit. So it's basically making a particular workflow a bit more optimized, that's all.

There certainly is nothing *wrong* with manual maintenance of the cover-letter file plus cut-and-paste when you want to update it. Just as there's nothing *wrong* with using git-write-tree instead of git-commit. Just a question of which is more convenient and less error prone. :-)

						- Ted