From: Linus Torvalds Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:42:22 GMT Subject: Re: [git patches] libata updates, GPG signed (but see admin notes) Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <7vsjm6gkte.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > You keep saying cut-and-paste, but do you mind feeding the e-mail text > itself to a tool, instead of cut-and-paste? Feeding the email to a tool is actually a fair amount of extra work. It would have worked well in the days when I used text-based email clients that just had a "pipe email to command" model, but that's long gone. In contrast, cut-and-paste to another program is easy - but then you really can't depend on whitespace or headers or other subtle things. > A respond-to-request-pull wrapper you would use could be: > >  - Get the e-mail from the standard input; >  - Pick up the signed bits and validate the signature; >  - Perform the requested fetch; and >  - Record the merge (or prepare .git/MERGE_MSG) with both the signed bits. So is there any reason this couldn't be cut-and-paste? Make the signed part small (*not* including diffstat and shortlog), and make it whitespace-safe, and I wouldn't mind a tool at all. If it *can* take the whole email, that would probably be a good design (so that a "pipe email to command" model would still work), but it would be much better if it doesn't require it. > and the "signed bits" could include: > >   - the repository and the branch you were expected to pull; >   - the topic description. > > among other things the requestor can edit when request-pull message is > prepared. One thing I'd like is that it would also fire up an editor for the merge, even if it gets the topic description from the email or cut-and-paste. I often want to fix up peoples grammar etc. That's a separate argument for trying to keep the signed part minimal - because I really don't want to have to maintain spelin errors just because they are part of what was signed.. Linus