Re: [PATCH] send-email: Refuse to send cover-letter template subject

From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date: Jun 12, 2009, 11:48 UTC
Message-ID: <200906121348.19103.trast@student.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To: <200906091019.11000.trast@student.ethz.ch>

Thomas Rast wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> writes:
> > 
> > > Every so often, someone sends out an unedited cover-letter template.
> > > Add a simple check to send-email that refuses to send if the subject
> > > contains "*** SUBJECT HERE ***", with an option --force to override.
> > 
> > Good ;-).  More valuable to detect would be an empty "blurb" section
> > (i.e. not "unedited *** BLURB HERE ***" string, but literally, there is
> > nothing said in the message other than the shortstat).
> 
> Wouldn't that be AI complete?  As in, whatever regex (or similar) you
> might cook up could probably be matched by *someone's* style of patch
> descriptions, and then it suddenly becomes rather hard to tell them
> apart.

For a contrived example, compare

-- 8< --
Thomas Rast (1):
  Documentation: teach stash/pop workflow instead of stash/apply
-- >8 --

and

-- 8< --
Patch (1):
  Some explanation of what patch number 1 does
-- >8 --

Except for the " (1):", the whole contents of the shortstat are given by the patches. So I don't think it's possible to tell them apart without figuring out what the shortlog would have said for the actual patches, and comparing that to the contents. I'd rather not parse the patches for author info and subject.

What do you want me to do about the patch? Should I extend it so that it traps both "*** BLURB HERE ***" and "*** SUBJECT HERE ***"?

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch