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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 27, 2007, 23:41 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0704271636130.9964@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <87wszxo2b5.wl%cworth@cworth.org>

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Carl Worth wrote:

> 
> PS. A separate reason I like attachments is that I like the subject
> and message body to be the actual discussion of the patch, (and the
> commit message and patch content to come later).

And the reason I _hate_ attachements is that you cannot say "no, that one is wrong", and just skip/edit it.

Because once you start doing attachments, you're not going have just one patch per email. You're going to have people send you ten attachments in one email for patches 1-10.

And when patch 5 is crap, you're basically screwed. There is almost no support for replying to that _individually_ and saying "That one sucks". You press "reply", and you get all ten.

So the fundamental rule *must* be: one patch, one email. That's the starting point. Anything else is simply broken.

And once you accept that fundamental rule (and quite frankly, I don't care if others accept it or not - I'm personally 100% convinved that anythign else is a major mistake), suddenly attachments have no upsides at all, only downsides. They mean that when you send the patch top a mailing list, everybody sees it differently, and a *lot* of people will be unable to reply to it with proper quoting.

		Linus