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Changing the defaults for send-email / suppress-cc ?

From
PGPaul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
Date
Feb 28, 2009, 19:29 UTC
Message-ID
<7d1d9c250902281129t1ea0d9d0k796d97bdd0af046d@mail.gmail.com>

I've been involved in helping people who are new git users, and the one thing that seems to violate the principle of least surprise for them is the default setting for the sendemail.suppresscc -- in that the new users don't expect the additional CC lines to be automatically added based on what is present in the content of the mbox (format-patch output).

The messages from send-email that indicate it is going to add CC lines based on SOB etc. come *after* the last input from the user, and so they don't have an opportunity to jump in and prevent the extra e-mails from going out to whoever happens to be listed in the patch. (Lets assume for the moment, that they didn't see "--dry-run", or simply figured the process looked fairly straightforward, and didn't see the need for it.)

Here is the use case which I suspect is fairly pervasive, and that I've already seen several times:

1) User is working on something involving kernel version X, which is
some amount behind the current mainstream HEAD.  (Okay, doesn't have
to be kernel, could even be git itself.)
2) They've created a branch off of X and they've added their own
commits, and also cherry picked relevant commits from upstream that
happened between X and HEAD into their branch.   One of the features
they've cherry picked onto their branch is a 25 patch series that has
"Signed-off-by: miserable@bofh.com" in it, a miserable person who
hates extra-emails.
3) They run "git format-patch -n --thread -o foo X..mybranch"
4) They run "git send-email --to coworker@mycompany.com foo"  so their
buddy within the company can have an mbox patchset.
5) They recoil in horror while smashing ^C as they try to stop
send-email from spamming miserable@bofh.com with 25 of his own
patches.
In light of this, I've simply advised new users to run something like:
git config --global sendemail.suppresscc all
...just so that they won't accidentally do what I've described in the above.

Apologies if this has been discussed before; I took a quick scan of my archive and didn't see any discussions on it. With the recent thread about warning people of non-back compatible changes that will appear post 1.6.2 -- I thought perhaps this was a good time to mention/consider it.

I'm not sure what the right thing to do here is -- I suspect if you made suppress-cc=all the default, then there would be more experienced users that would complain about having to explicitly add a suppress-cc=self to get the old behaviour? Would that be acceptable? I don't know...

Thanks, Paul.

Next: Junio C Hamano
Message 1 of 10 in “Changing the defaults for send-email / suppress-cc ?”
  1. Paul GortmakerFeb 28, 2009
  2. Junio C HamanoMar 1, 2009
  3. Paul GortmakerMar 1, 2009
  4. send-email: confirm auto cc before sendingJay Soffian, Mar 1, 2009
  5. Sverre RabbelierMar 1, 2009
  6. Nanako ShiraishiMar 1, 2009
  7. Jay SoffianMar 1, 2009
  8. Jay SoffianMar 1, 2009
  9. Jay SoffianMar 1, 2009
  10. Teemu LikonenMar 1, 2009

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