Re: [PATCH] send-email: do not prompt for In-Reply-To

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 27, 2020, 19:34 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqtuwnq3x1.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20200827192029.GA63138@Carlos-MBP>

Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón <carenas@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 03:14:57PM -0400, Drew DeVault wrote:
>> Do you have sendemail.to set in your local git config?
>
> I do and can't reproduce either; which version of git do you have this
> problem with?

Any recent version of git-send-email, I would say. The relevant code snippets are:

    my $prompting = 0;
    if (!@initial_to && !defined $to_cmd) {
            my $to = ask("$to_whom ",
                         default => "",
                         valid_re => qr/\@.*\./, confirm_only => 1);
            push @initial_to, parse_address_line($to) if defined $to; #
            $prompting++;
    }
    ...
    @initial_to = process_address_list(@initial_to);
    @initial_cc = process_address_list(@initial_cc);
    @initial_bcc = process_address_list(@initial_bcc);

    if ($thread && !defined $initial_in_reply_to && $prompting) {
            $initial_in_reply_to = ask(
                    __("Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first email (if any)? "),
                    default => "",
                    valid_re => qr/\@.*\./, confirm_only => 1);
    }

where initial_to is set either from the command line or sendemail.to configuration variable and before the control reaches this section of the code. In addition to realizing "ah, To: address is not given so we need to ask" and ask the to address, it says "since we have already interatively asked the end-user anyway, we can and should ask other things as well" by incrementing $prompting.

That feels both understandable and bogus at the same time. To: is pretty much required (yes, you can use cc: and bcc: without any address on To:, but that is not something you'd usually do to send patches to mailing lists), so lack of it means either asking interactively or aborting. But other things like in-reply-to are optional, and tying the decision to prompt for them or not does not feel OK.