Re: [PATCH 2/3] git send-email: do not ask questions when --compose is used.

From: Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org>
Date: Nov 1, 2008, 17:08 UTC
Message-ID: <20081101170817.GC26229@artemis.corp>
In-Reply-To: <20081101130033.GD17961@sys-0.hiltweb.site>

On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 01:00:33PM +0000, Ian Hilt wrote:

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> On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 12:04:39PM +0100, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> > I didn't do it for a very good reason: the To field is tricker to parse
> > because very fast it's multiline, and must be split along the ',' when
> > parsed back and so on.
> 
> Right.  So my patch is broken in that it doesn't parse the addresses
> correctly.  This _should_ be easy to fix.  I knew my patch sucked, but I
> wanted to get the idea out there.  For me, I don't like specifying all
> that information on the command-line.  It would be nice to be able to
> edit the To and Cc fields in the editor.
> 
> > And even moreuseful than the To is the Cc list that git-send-email
> > bloats to death and that I would like to reduce very often.
> 
> You mean git-send-email adds too many addresses to the Cc list, or the
> code for those fields is already bloated to death?

The former, I've not looked at the code I can't really say.

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> > But sadly that needs an expertise of perl I absolutely don't have. We
> > probably even want to depend on some MIME perl library that knows about
> > those kind of issues and do it for us well.
> 
> I'm confused here.  Why would a MIME library help?

Hmm maybe I'm wrong, but the idea would be to do what mutt does and be able to parse:

To: John Doe <some.address@some.tld>, Random Joe <random.joe@abc.def>,
  Superman <batman@nyc.us>,
  "Someone with a comma, inside its tag name" <a@b.com>

And that needs to know how to do that with perl, and _really_ I hate perl enough for not being able to do that well. Splitting on ',' is just not going to fly.

> > But yeah, I knew I left out those, and this was the reason.
> 
> Anyway, do you, or does anyone else, think it's even worth coding the
> possibility for the user to edit the To and Cc fields?

*YES*

I would love to see git-send-email work like mutt does: it fills the field like it does now, and you are allowed to fix that, and it parses the buffer back to guess what you wanted. It allow to drop most of the interactive prompting that is so annoying (since it's not in-shell and has no history and stuff like that, unlike my $EDITOR).

-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                madcoder@debian.org
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org