Re: storing cover letter of a patch series?

> [sorry if this is not the right place to 'drop in'..]
> I appreciate there has been a lot of discussion, but it mainly appears to be
> about an upstream / integration viewpoint.
>
> I'd hate it if there was a one size fits all solution that was only focused
> on one important use case, rather than having at least a simple fallback for
> simple folk.
>
> Personally I liked the idea that I could start my patch series branch with a
> simple 'empty' commit with a commit message that read "cover! <subject of
> the series>" and continue with the cover letter. It's essentially the same
> as the fixup! and squash! idea (more the latter - it's squash! without a
> predecessor). For moderate size series a simple 'git rebase master..' is
> sufficient to see the whole series and decide which need editing, rewording,
> swapping, checking the fixups, etc.
>
> Format-patch would then be taught to spot that the first commit in the
> series is "cover! <subject>" and create the usual 0/N cover letter. Git Gui
> may need to be taught to recognise cover! (haven't checked if it recognises
> an empty commit squash!). Possibly 'git commit' may want a --cover option to
> massage the commit message and add --allow-empty, but that's finesse.
>
> I've no problem with more extensive methods for those preparing very big
> patch series, or with those needing to merge together a lot of series and
> want to keep the cover letters, but ensuring that a simple flow is possible
> should still be there.
> --
> Philip
>