Re: [RFC] Add a new email notification script to "contrib"

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: Jul 18, 2012, 07:52 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqobndld4v.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <1342249182-5937-1-git-send-email-mhagger@alum.mit.edu>

mhagger@alum.mit.edu writes:

> * One email per commit [1].  For each reference change, the script
>   first emits one email summarizing the reference change (including
>   one-line summaries of the new commits), then emits a separate email
>   for each new commit that was introduced, including patches.

I have a dirty hack to do that on my private repositories (instead of sending mail on receive, the script runs as a cron job, does a "git fetch" on each repo on my machine, and sends me patches for new commits with "git send-email"). I had several problems with it:

* Binary content was sometimes embedded in the patch. It's cool that
  "git send-email" can base64-encode content when I send a patch to
  someone, but it's counter-productive when used for code review. So, I
  used "git format-patch --no-binary".

* Even with that, I sometimes had overly long lines (e.g. non-text files
  that were shown as a one long line, I don't remember exactly the
  use-case, probably postscript files or so) that were confusing my
  mailer. So, I added

    # Truncate long lines
    perl -pi -e 's/^(.{500}).*/$1 [...]/' $patches

  to my script to truncate them.

You probably want to test these cases, and allow (configurably) the user to do some cleanup on patches before they are sent.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/