Re: Pain points in Git's patch flow

From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Apr 26, 2021, 14:24 UTC
Message-ID: <YIbNE0Fw2VaZt9ry@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <YIYfsMsz0Uz48GaI@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>

On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 02:04:32AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> In general, I have trouble keeping track of the patch mails I've sent.
> I do definitely need to refer to them later, but I don't generally keep
> them around on my system since they tend to duplicate my repository, so
> I end up needing to find them in my mailbox, which as mentioned, is
> slow and error prone.

A quick and easy feature request to this (which I have had as well) would be implementing a sendmail.fcc config, which if set, would append any mail messages sent by git send-email to the Unix mbox file specified by sendmail.fcc.

Once you have the message id of any patch mail that you've sent...

Show 7 quoted lines

> I have trouble finding all the spots where people have given me review
> feedback.  I have patch mails and responses to those mails go to a
> particular folder, but I still often find that I'm not quite sure if
> I've gotten every piece of feedback in a review.  Sometimes,
> embarrassingly, I don't, and then I have to send another reroll.
> Regardless, this makes rerolling a series much slower as I have to comb
> my mail multiple times.

This becomes pretty easy to solve using existing tooling. For people who like web interfaces:

    https://lore.kernel.org/r/<message-id>

(This works today because git@vger.kernel.org is archived by the lore.kernel.org public-inbox archive.)

Or for those who like CLI's and/or text-based mail readers such as mutt or pine:

   b4 mbox -o /tmp <message-id>

This will dump the full mail thread (given any any message-id in that mail thread) to /tmp/<messaige-id>.mbx in Unix mbox format, again relying on lore.kernel.org. I've found this to be especially handy if I've been cc'ed part-way through a mail thread, or if I was only cc'ed on a single patch and I want to see the full patch series for context.

Cheers,

						- Ted