Re: [PATCH RESEND] send-email: add 'specify-author' option

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 6, 2012, 22:30 UTC
Message-ID: <7vobr4ze5z.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAMP44s1m2exUVRTzcBJrY8hnWxF+uEt58AQOP5vKiA3tfeRXRQ@mail.gmail.com>

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

Show 31 quoted lines

>> The "Subject:" is very often used in the wild, when responding to an
>> existing discussion thread with a patch, without changing the topic of the
>> thread (I would say it is used more than "From: " override).
>
> Hmm, but that is different, isn't it?
>
> AFAIK people use this format:
>
> ---
> $headers
>
> Message
>
> Patch (format-patch output: headers, commit message, diff)
> ---
>
> In this case 'git am' would ignore the patch headers. The only way
> 'git am' would override $headers, is if the first part of the body has
> new headers:
>
> ---
> $headers
>
> $patch_headers
>
> $patch_commit_message
>
> $patch_diff
> ---
>
> IOW; if there's no message at the beginning of the body.

Your notation is a bit unclear to me, but I take that $headers mean the e-mail headers, and $patch_headers mean what we often call "in-body" headers; in other words, your patch is "duplicate my authorship in $patch_headers because my MSA/MTA mangles my name in $headers." Am I following you well so far?

What I meant to say was that perhaps the approach can help the same class of issues where other fields in $headers can be corrupted and the user wants duplicate in "in-body", assuming that it is less likely to be eaten, and non-ASCII subject was one example that immediately came to my mind.

So in that sense, it is not much a different issue.

> I can't foresee that, but I guess we can do it anyway. So which would
> be the fields to repeat? From, Date, and Subject?

I would say From and Subject are equally worth considering.