Re: [PATCH v2] format-patch: fix From header in cover letter

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 19, 2026, 11:43 UTC
Message-ID: <20260219114307.GC3529@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqecmje6o6.fsf@gitster.g>

On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 07:22:33AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> > I never
> > use it (and I probably forgot it even existed, given that most people
> > would use send-email's cover letter generation, and I do my own thing
> > with mutt).
> 
> I use it myself and I really hate the way it lists the patches.  We
> should have done "log --oneline --reverse" instead of "shortlog", as
> it is hard to understand the reference the cover letter message
> makes to individual patches like "the first two patches do X", etc.

Agreed. I have long hated the shortlog version. According to the commit history of my personal scripts, I've been sending with:

   [1/3]: subject of the first patch
   [2/3]: the second patch
   [3/3]: and so on

since at least 2009, and nobody has complained. ;)

Sadly I don't think there is an easy way to do so with "log --format", as it can't just be a single output placeholder (you have to do the whole traversal to get the "/3" part, so the caller needs to know this and queue up the output).

I do it locally by piping the format-patch output through something like:

  sed -ne 's/^Subject: //p' |
  sed -e 's/\[PATCH /[/' \
      -e 's/]/]:/' \
      -e 's/^/  /'

Of course that does not handle rfc822 header continuations, which we started to do at some point for long subjects. So now the first part is some gnarly perl. :-/

Probably some combination of "git log --format=%s", "nl", "wc -l" would be less horrid. I stuck with format-patch because of its somewhat magical command-line parsing of revisions. E.g., saying "git format-patch @{upstream}" will give you the patches on the topic branch, rather than all history down to the roots.

But anyway, if this were happening internally in format-patch's cover-letter code, it should be quite easy to do (we have the complete list of patches and their subjects there already).

-Peff