Re: [PATCH RESEND] send-email: add 'specify-author' option

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 6, 2012, 21:48 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s1m2exUVRTzcBJrY8hnWxF+uEt58AQOP5vKiA3tfeRXRQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vbon41ugg.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 11:22 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Some mail servers (Microsoft Exchange) mangle the 'From' header, so
>>>> while applying the patches, the author has to be fixed manually.
>>> ...
>>> I wouldn't say that the existing option names to send-email are great, but
>>> I have to say that the one added by this is simply horrible ;-)
>>>
>>> The first paragraph of the proposed commit log message states the problem
>>> it tries to address very clearly, which is good, but is "From: " the only
>>> thing that needs this?  I am wondering if this should be named and behave
>>> more like "--duplicate-header" or "--in-body-header".
>>
>> I have never seen any other 'in-body-header' other than From, and I
>> don't see how that would be useful. Anybody else?
>
> The "Subject:" is very often used in the wild, when responding to an
> existing discussion thread with a patch, without changing the topic of the
> thread (I would say it is used more than "From: " override).

Hmm, but that is different, isn't it?

AFAIK people use this format:

--- $headers

Message

Patch (format-patch output: headers, commit message, diff) ---

In this case 'git am' would ignore the patch headers. The only way 'git am' would override $headers, is if the first part of the body has new headers:

--- $headers

$patch_headers

$patch_commit_message

$patch_diff ---

IOW; if there's no message at the beginning of the body.

> When using send-email to start a thread anew, this use case is much less
> of a problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if a broken MSA/MTA mangled the
> subject (especially imagine a non-ASCII ones) incorrectly which would be
> helped with exactly the same in-body-header mechanism.

I can't foresee that, but I guess we can do it anyway. So which would be the fields to repeat? From, Date, and Subject?

> You probably meant "I do not want to hear from Junio" by your last
> half-sentence, but I replied anyway ;-).

I meant I wanted to know which fields would be useful to put in the body.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras