Re: [PATCH 0/4] format-patch: fix an option coexistence bug and add new --resend option

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Apr 17, 2024, 06:23 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cRzCSO_4r02Vc-OpH3Cyz0iTWv+q4oTRg30H5Qvzz=X7g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <36c4a1e23653c2844a52fd994501287d@manjaro.org>

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 2:07 AM Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org> wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On 2024-04-17 08:02, Eric Sunshine wrote:
> > [*] For instance, my knee-jerk reaction is that we don't want to keep
> > piling on these special-case flags each time someone wants their new
> > favorite word as a lead-in to "PATCH". In addition to --rfc, and
> > --resend, the next person might want --rfd or --tbd, etc. More
> > palatable would be a general-purpose option which lets you specify the
> > prefix which appears in front of "PATCH", but even that can be argued
> > as unnecessary since we already have --subject-prefix.
>
> Makes sense, but in that case accepting the --rfc option, back at the
> time, was actually some kind of a mistake, if you agree.

Possibly. It does happen that, in retrospect, some changes come to be viewed as mistakes. On the other hand, if --rfc existed before --subject-prefix was introduced, then --rfc would just be historic accretion rather than a mistake. (I didn't check which option came first.)

At any rate, we probably want to be careful about piling on more special-cases without considering general-purpose solutions.