Re: Is there some way to suppress Cc email only to stable?

From: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Date: Feb 9, 2015, 21:43 UTC
Message-ID: <20150209214312.GC4166@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqtwyuaipa.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Mon, Feb 09, 2015 at 01:17:05PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 35 quoted lines

> "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, Feb 09, 2015 at 12:57:11PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> >> No, I do not think we have a way to blacklist certain recipient
> >> addresses from getting passed to the MTA, and I do not object to
> >> addition of such a mechanism if there is a valid need to do so.
> >> 
> >> It feels a bit too convoluted to say "Cc: to this address" in the
> >> log message and then "nonono, I do not want to send there", though.
> >> Why do you want to have Cc: in the log message if you do not want to
> >> send e-mail to that address in the first place?  Allowing the
> >> behaviour you are asking for would mean that those who see that the
> >> commit appeared on a branch would not be able to assume that the
> >> patch has already been sent to the stable review address, no?
> >
> > I could see where it might seem a bit strange.  ;-)
> >
> > The reason behind this is that you are not supposed to actually send
> > email to the stable lists until after the patch has been accepted into
> > mainline.  One way to make this work is of course to leave the stable
> > Cc tags out of the commit log, and to manually send an email when the
> > commit has been accepted.  However, this is subject to human error,
> > and more specifically in this case, -my- human error.
> >
> > Hence the desire to have a Cc that doesn't actually send any email,
> > but that is visible in mainline for the benefit of the scripts that
> > handle the stable workflow.
> 
> So a configuration variable that you can set once and forget, e.g.
> 
>     [sendemail]
> 	blacklistedRecipients = stable@vger.kernel.org
> 
> would not cut it, as you would _later_ want to send the e-mail once
> the commit hits the mainline.  Am I reading you correctly?

This would actually work for me. Once the patch is accepted into mainline, I am done with it. So I should -never- send email to stable@vger.kernel.org, unless I am doing so manually, for example because I forgot to add the stable tag to a given commit. But in that case, I would just use mutt to forward the patch to stable@vger.kernel.org, and git would not be involved.

So as far as I can see, yes, it would be perfectly OK to unconditionally blacklist stable@vger.kernel.org within my git tree. That would be nice!

> Or is it that nobody actually sends to stable@vger.kernel.org address
> manually, but some automated process scans new commits that hit the
> mainline and the string "Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org" is used as a cue
> for that process to pick them up?

I belive that something like this happens, but I don't know the details. I do know that it does not involve any of my local git trees. ;-)

							Thanx, Paul