Re: git am should recognize >From

From: Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>
Date: Sep 19, 2010, 18:01 UTC
Message-ID: <87wrqheho4.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinOa+s-28PYXHhtKr_POu2D33ibfgKDKk4Wqi=9@mail.gmail.com>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> Aside: it seems that many format-patch users are not using it to
> generate an mbox with a template message, as originally intended;

Myself included. I don't like other things sending mail for me outside of my normal mail client, since my normal mail client does lots of other things (like know what From address to use, save copies of outgoing mail, etc.).

> instead, they just write a cover letter and attach the generated patches
> to it. Are we not advertising the "am --scissors" facility[1] well
> enough?

That seems like a bad substitute for real MIME structure. My experience is that patches as actual MIME attachments fare much better and are much less likely to be mangled when getting to the committer than patches inlined in the body of a message. (Yes, this is a 180 degree reversal from the situation about ten years ago.)

Speaking of git am features, it would also be lovely if git am would recognize and accept the format produced by git show, since a lot of beginning Git users tend towards git show output instead of git format-patch.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>