Re: [PATCH 1/2] format-patch: Add a signature option (--signature)

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 16, 2010, 16:53 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwrtygbq5.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <DB1710D5-1699-45C2-8884-5D60C5240ED9@mit.edu>

Theodore Tso <tytso@MIT.EDU> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> On Jun 15, 2010, at 1:00 AM, Stephen Boyd wrote:
>> 
>> This does modify the original behavior of format-patch a bit. First
>> off the version string is now placed in the cover letter by default.
>
> I don't know how important people will feel this to be, but I've occasionally
> found it interesting to see how many people are using various different
> versions of git in a particular development community, and having the
> version in the signature is a useful gauge on that.

The original motivation of the version signature was exactly that ;-).

> Putting it in the cover
> letter isn't really a complete substitute for this because many patches
> and short patch series go out without cover letters...

I think you misread Stephen, he misspoke, or I misread the patch. The intention of the change as I understand it is to put the signature in the cover letter, in addition to the patches.

One bad thing about having the "signature" line at the end of patch is that various third party tools mistake it as one extra deleted line. One offender that is most often seen to corrupt patches is Emacs diff mode. Doing an equivalent of "recountdiff" after it allows the user to edit a patch is fine, but it doesn't bother to remember what was in the original and what was added/deleted by the user, and instead seems to just recount the result from scratch.