Re: [PATCH] contrib/hooks/post-receive-email: send individual mails to recipients

From: Michael Adam <obnox@samba.org>
Date: Nov 12, 2008, 22:21 UTC
Message-ID: <E1L0O5U-00CBIw-3Y@intern.SerNet.DE>
In-Reply-To: <7v3ahwq043.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> Michael Adam <obnox@samba.org> writes:
> 
> > Junio C Hamano wrote:
> >> Michael Adam <obnox@samba.org> writes:
> >> 
> >> > This changes the behaviour of post-receive-email when a list of recipients
> >> > (separated by commas) is specified as hooks.mailinglist. With this modification,
> >> > an individual mail is sent out for each recipient entry in the list, instead
> >> > of sending a single mail with all the recipients in the "To: " field.
> >> 
> >> Why can that be an improvement?
> >
> > My use case is that I have a repository where I want to send
> > commit messages to an "official" mailing list and to a private
> > recipient list that might not want to be seen on the official
> > mailing list.
> 
> Ah.  What you want is a capability to add Bcc:, not a misfeature to run
> the log formatter repeatedly wasting cycles only to generate the same
> message contents.

The intent was to send out the mail not to a (large) list of individual recipients but to some (few) mailing lists separately. A Bcc would be a partial solution. I also thought about that, but I did not like it since it might make those recipients in the bcc field feel strange because they seem to be getting mail from a list they might not be subscribed to. Group-replying to such mails may also cause confusion...

Of course my patch could be optimized for not wasting cycles by only running generate_email_header() multiple times and caching the results of the log formatter and generate_email_footer().

But I understand that my problem is a very specific one and that generally no benefit but only disadvantage is seen in the modification I suggested. -- Sorry for the noise. :-)

Cheers - Michael