Re: Including branch info in git format-patch

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 19, 2008, 20:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20080619202843.GA6207@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20080619154251.GA16475@jurassic>

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 09:12:52PM +0530, Mukund Sivaraman wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> When i use "git format-patch", it doesn't seem to include the branch (or
> remote) name in the email it creates. So a reader of this mail may not
> know what branch to apply it on to test it. Aside from adding in branch
> information manually in the body of the message, is there any other
> existing way to get git format-patch to include it?

No, there isn't a way to do it automatically. On this mailing list, patches are assumed to be on top of "master" unless explicitly indicated otherwise. And we usually just mention it manually.

You could potentially add a config option to put the branch name inside the '[PATCH]' text. This text is generally stripped away before applying, so it would still free up the receiver to apply on whatever branch they wanted. I don't think it would make sense for git development, since we typically use topic branches, so keeping it configurable would make sense.

On the receiving end, the applying party could set up their MUA to split patches based on the subject, and then apply them as appropriate (this very much depends on their workflow for applying patches). You could probably even do a pre-applypatch hook as a safety valve to make sure things were being applied in the right place.

-Peff