Re: patch submission process, was Re: [PATCH v6 06/16] merge_recursive: abort properly upon errors

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Aug 7, 2016, 08:46 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1608071039410.5786@virtualbox>
In-Reply-To: <20160806214325.GA9484@starla>

Hi,

On Sat, 6 Aug 2016, Eric Wong wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > Somebody mentioned "configuring it is hard--why does the user have
> > to know SMTP subtleties", and that may be a valid complaint against
> > the primary part of send-email.  The solution for that is not to
> > discard it with bathwater, but make it just as easy as other MSAs,
> > say, Thunderbird, to configure for an average user who can configure
> > these other MUAs.
> 
> Sadly, the average user does not use an MUA, SMTP or IMAP, anymore.
> It's all webmail or apps using proprietary protocols.
> Embrace, extend, extinguish :<

I think you both got it wrong. The original citizens were the mail clients that allowed you to communicate with other human beings. Webmail is just a new generation of the same commodity. It is our usage to transport machine-readable content (and not as an attachment!) that is the intruder.

It's not making things better if we require users to use a second mail client for sending out patches, and, oh, it does nothing to help with reintegrating patches back into Git, were they had been before taking that perilous and lossy journey through that medium called email.

Ciao, Dscho