Re: [PATCH 0/9] applymbox updates and assorted trivial patches.

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jul 21, 2005, 06:58 UTC
Message-ID: <7vsly8bq71.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20050721061906.GN20369@mythryan2.michonline.com>

Ryan Anderson <ryan@michonline.com> writes:

> Is it just me, or does format-patch lose the commit comments during
> export?  I haven't experimented with your new patches yet - and since
> I'm at OLS and playing with Git during my free time, my brain is pretty
> much shut down now - so if you have happen to have fixed that, thanks!

Oh, I envy you guys!  Have fun at OLS.

As far as I know, the commit comments are not lost since the original version of format-patch. What I added as extras with today's patch are the original author name, email and author timestamp. There wasn't a provision to record these in the output from format-patch.

The applymbox/applypatch pair Linus did allowed you to have an extra "From:" line as the first line of the e-mail patch submission when you are forwarding a patch somebody else has written. When such e-mail is applied to his repository using applymbox (back then it was called "dotest"), however, the original author timestamp is lost, and instead the commit gets timestamp from the message forwarding the patch. That is what I meant by the loss of information.

Once I acked a patch to Linus with "Author-Date:" line as the second line of the e-mail message (the first being the "From:"), and he told me to refrain from doing it "for now", but that "for now" has never been lifted, so I decided to lift it myself ;-).

The changed format-patch can be told to produce "Date:" (instead of "Author-Date:"), and "From:". There is a corresponding change to the receiving end (the mailinfo program that is used by applymbox/applypatch pair) to read this extra "Date:" line and use that instead of the timestamp obtained from the e-mail submission.