Re: [RFC] format-patch: Ensure that author and commit time are not lost

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 16, 2009, 05:20 UTC
Message-ID: <20091116052041.GD14664@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vzl6nfqkx.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 01:03:42PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> I would expect the right solution would be to give send-email an ability
> to either (1) use "Sender:" to record the operator of the MUA while
> keeping "From: " taken from the payload, or (2) duplicate "From: " as an
> in-body header when it sends out.

I agree that send-email is the "right" place for this functionality in the git toolchain. And indeed, it already does (2):

  $ sed -ne '/$author ne $sender/,+1p' git-send-email.perl
          if (defined $author and $author ne $sender) {
                          $message = "From: $author\n\n$message";

That being said, like you, I usually pull the patches directly from format-patch into my MUA, and I fix up the headers manually. I suspect there are many others who do the same thing. And each of us has to either handle this case manually, or write our own munging code ourselves for our particular setup.

So in that sense, even though format-patch is not the right place, it may be useful for it to give tool support to people who do not use the "format-patch to send-email" workflow. In other words, I would be happy if my short glue shell-script became:

  git format-patch --stdout --sender-is-me "$@" >mbox &&
  mutt -f mbox

and this just handled the case properly, without me having to parse the From header of each message and munge the messages in my script.

The arguments against it are:

  1. It is polluting format-patch with MUA cruft.

  2. --sender-is-me (besides being a terrible name) may not be
     expressive enough. You might want --sender=... depending on the
     setup of the calling script.

Honestly, though, I send few enough patches made by other people that I have never found it to be a huge burden. This would be a minor convenience to have.

-Peff