Re: [PATCH v9] Documentation/remote-helpers: Add invocation section

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 7, 2010, 17:23 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzl1fch2d.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <n2nf3271551004070950ucf314b40g56087d49dfbd29f1@mail.gmail.com>

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

> Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Earlier, Junio also had a
> problem with one of my patches being corrupt. I used git-imap-send and
> the GMail web interface to fill out the "to", "cc" and some comments.

In the above procedure, up to imap-send, everything would be fine, but I heard GMail web interface still wraps lines before sending the result out.

Gmail section in Documentation/SubmittingPatches says:

  GMail does not appear to have any way to turn off line wrapping in the web
  interface, so this will mangle any emails that you send.  You can however
  use any IMAP email client to connect to the google imap server, and forward
  the emails through that.  Just make sure to disable line wrapping in that
  email client.  Alternatively, use "git send-email" instead.

This is a tangent, but I think this can still be further improved. What it says is not incorrect per-se, but the "can however" gives a false hope to people who have been burned by the web interface. The fact it lists are:

 - GMail web interface will wrap lines and corrupt patches, no matter what
   you do;

 - With imap-send, you can stuff messages to your outbox at GMail, and
   using IMAP client that does _not_ corrupt messages, you can send things
   out.

Combined together, these mean that you lose even if you preprare your outbox with imap-send if you send out the end result from their web interface.

At the minimum, we could add a parenthesized comment like this.

  the emails through that.  Just make sure to disable line wrapping in
  that email client (again, there is no way to tell GMail web interface to
  do so).