Re: [PATCH] send-email: new 'add-envelope' option

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 22, 2009, 23:54 UTC
Message-ID: <7v7htice04.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <94a0d4530911220437l5386b36ds4ef06dc66cc11bcc@mail.gmail.com>

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> I thought a bit more about this, and in the end what we really want is
> to add the sender envelope. The most typical case would be to use the
> 'from' address, but we should be able to override it (we do both by
> using --envelope-sender).
>
> So here are other options.
>
> a) --add-envelope: add the sender envelope, by default it would be the
> 'from' address, but could be overridden by --envelope-sender.

I do not think the latter half of this description makes much sense, as the existing --envelope-sender=<this-address> alone already says "add this envelope sender".

It is unfortunate that we cannot sanely have an option that takes an optional string argument from the command line. Ideally, if we can specify --envelope-sender without any argument, we could make it to mean "pretend as if the 'from' address is given to this option", but that would make the command line pasing ambiguous, so we would need an extra option like this one. "--envelope-sender=from" might be a more intuitive way to say this, though.

> b) --envelope-sender="" or "auto": this would require minimal changes
> but looks a bita strange.

An explicit empty string does look very strange, but I do not think a magic word like "auto" (or "from") that cannot sanely be your envelope sender address is a bad idea.

> Any thoughts?

It is much easier to work on the configuration front, by the way, and I expect people who regularly interact with multiple projects to appreciate this feature would configure their send-email once and forget about it, so the command line clunkiness might not be such a big issue.

A user who works with more than one projects with different identity known to each project would use $HOME/.gitconfig and send-email configuration identity feature to set "sendemail.<identity>.from" and friends in there, while setting sendemail.identity configuration in .git/config for each project, so being able to say "use whatever 'from' as the envelope sender" once in $HOME/.gitconfig would be convenient.

So I could have in $HOME/.gitconfig:

        [sendemail]
		; used as a boolean to say "use from"
                envelopesender
        [sendemail.git]
                from = Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
                to = git mailing list <git@vger.kernel.org>
        [sendemail.frotz]
                from = Junio C Hamano <frotzster@example.xz>
                to = frotz mailing list <frotz@example.xz>

and then in my {git,frotz}.git/.git/config would have

        [sendemail]                     [sendemail]
                identity = git                  identity = frotz

respectively. Without your patch, in $HOME/.gitconfig, I wouldn't have the global sendemail.envelopesender but have separate individual configuration variables sendemail.{git,frotz}.envelopesender defined.