Re: [PATCH] format-patch: Properly escape From_ lines when creating an mbox.

On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:48:44 -0700, "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:

I suggest as a first step accepting the following:

	format-patch: Emit bare email rather than mbox for single messages.
	<id:1276040615-26008-1-git-send-email-cworth@cworth.org>

That patch should be entirely uncontroversial since it doesn't introduce any new escaping, neither on the production nor on the consumption side.

It has the tremendous benefit of removing the mbox format entirely from the "git send-email" workflow, (which will just use bare messages instead).

With that patch in place, the only place that git will still generate mbox files is "format-patch --stdout". And the most common use of that is within git-rebase. For git-rebase, it doesn't matter what kind of mbox is used as long as it's consistent, since it's practically guaranteed that git-rebase will be using consistent versions of both "git format-patch" and "git am".

At that point, I think discussion of confusion from new format-patch and old am becomes almost meaningless as such interaction will most likely be happening through bare messages rather than mbox files. When an mbox file *is* involved I think it will be even more likely to happen through some external program, (such as an MUA collecting a thread of git-send-email messages and presenting them to "git am" as an mbox).

-Carl