Re: FEATURE REQUEST: git-format-path: Add option to encode patch content

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 27, 2007, 21:40 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0704271430490.9964@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <87y7kdo6pn.wl%cworth@cworth.org>

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Carl Worth wrote:

> 
> My MUA doesn't have support (that I know of) for piping a sequence of
> messages to a command. Do your MUAs? If not, how do people generally
> handle long sequences of [n/N] patch emails?

Well, in pine you *can* actually select a long sequence of messages, and then "a|" to "apply a pipe" to them, and ask for them to be sent as-is, and thus push them directly to git-am if you wanted to.

But quite frankly, I've never done it. It's _much_ easier to just select the messages, do "as" to "apply save", and just save them to a new mbox, and them apply that mbox in another xterm.

One reason I do that is that while I've trained my cadre of killer kernel development monkeys to send me emails in the proper format, I quite often end up editing away things like "Hi, please apply" and "thanks" etc. And I actually add my sign-offs manually.

(Of course, my "manual" sign-off is often a "search-and-replace" of the previous sign-off, so that I not only don't have to type that much, but also so that my workflow automatically guarantees that I only sign off on stuff that was signed off by the sender, and I notice if my search-and-replace says that it replaced 213 entries, even though I expected to have 214 emails there..)

I'm sure there are mail clients that don't support even that kind of basic automation ("Please save each email individually! Because mousing around is good for you! It's the only exercise you get!"), but I can't imagine that anybody uses them. So the "save to a file, go through it there, fix up, and apply" sequence is a pretty good one. And it scales really well.

(By "scales really well", I mean that I usually end up doing series of just a few emails. But occasionally I have batches either from a single user, or multiple different people who I batch up in one go, and I do tens and even hundreds of patches in one "go" - I do *not* want to switch back-and-forth between the email client and another xterm, but at the same time, email clients really aren't generally set up to doing things like search-and-replace etc on hundreds of messages at a time).

I'm sure if you use GNU emacs to read email, you could do it all within that emacs client, but I couldn't help you with that anyway.

		Linus