Re: Diffs "from" working directory

On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 06:17:15PM +0100, Blaisorblade wrote:

What misunderstanding?  Could you quote it?

That's a diff *to* the working directory. My complaint was that there wasn't a convenient way to get a diff *from* the working directory.

It's nice to have a convenient shorthand for the current working directory, and since there's already a shorthand for the HEAD ("HEAD") it seemed more sensible to make "" the current working directory.

It's a minor point, but it seems convenient.

--b.

On Sun, 20 Nov 2005, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

Something like

	git diff -R -M -p

should do it, no?

("git diff" has the strange property that if you give it any diff flags at all, it forgets all the default ones. So it defaults to "-M -p", but if you just say "-R", it will drop its own defaults, and use _just_ "-R").

[ Which is almost certainly not what most users want, but it's practical 
  when you want to get the internal git format. Whether that is important 
  enough to confuse users or not, I dunno ]

		Linus

On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 10:13:32AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

A "-R" option to "stg diff" would be convenient, sure.--b.

J. Bruce Fields wrote:

that might be an even more intuitive way to dig out what is wanted.

btw, catalin, this was bruce's patch. i'm not sure why i was listed as the author (probably a mistake of mine when i imported his patch into my repository). ah well.

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On 21/11/05, Chuck Lever <cel@citi.umich.edu> wrote:

I also like the idea of having a -R option (--reverse the long version). This would mean reversing the commit that changed the diff -r option.

My import command sets the author to the e-mail sender, which was you.
Maybe this should be changed but I don't know which option is better.
In the meantime, you can change the default e-mail template to set the
From: line with to the author of the patch and maybe add a Reply-to:
with your address.

-- Catalin

Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@gmail.com> writes:

... and Sender: perhaps?

The first lines in the commit log message sent over e-mail can have "Subject: " (or "[PATCH] "), "From: ", and "Date: " to override what is slurped from e-mail headers if you use mailinfo, so that might be a better alternative to suggest.

On 21/11/05, Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:

Yes.

Thanks for the suggestion. It is indeed a good idea to parse the commit log and override the information from the headers.

-- Catalin

Catalin Marinas wrote:

for some reason i was under the impression that it would parse the 
Signed-off-by: fields in the patch description, and take the first one 
as the patch author.

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On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Chuck Lever wrote:

The first sign-off really isn't necessarily the author.

It might be a company sign-off (many companies don't want any random engineer to send out patches), but much more commonly it's a trivial patch that somebody else signs off on, even if the original patcher didn't (see case (b) in the sign-off-rules: you can sign of on somebody elses work if you know it's under the GPL).

So the fact that there was a sign-off procedure doesn't automatically mean that the author will be the first sign-off person, although in _practice_ that obviously would likely always be the most common case by far.

(Another reason is that some people actually add the sign-offs above previous ones. It happens, although if I notice, I try to point it out).

So authorship really is totally separate from sign-off, and all _my_ tools take the authorship from the first "From:" line at the top of the message body or from the email itself.

			Linus

Linus Torvalds wrote:

heh.  in fact that is what my company (NetApp) requires.

then perhaps the problem is that the "stg mail" tool should place the author in the From: field automatically? (ie change the tool, or permanently modify the default template that comes with StGIT to do this, as Catalin suggested earlier).

that seems a little twisty to me; you're overloading the SMTP header field instead of explicitly specifying patch authorship. seems like a layering violation.

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On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Chuck Lever wrote:

No, I only use the actual SMTP header field if the _body_ of the email doesn't contain the "From:".

So there's really two different "From:" lines: there's the SMTP header one, which is just a default fallback one, and there's the first non-empty line of the email body itself, which is the preferred one. No layering violation, just two different layers that have the same format for the line.

See "The Perfect Patch" by Andrew, and bullet (4): Attribution:

	http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/tpp.txt

To quote:

   'If someone else wrote the patch, they should be credited (and blamed) 
    for it. To communicate this, add a line:

    From: John Doe <jdoe@wherever.com>

    as the very first line of the email.  Downstream tools will pick this 
    up and jdoe will get the git "Author" line.'

and I'd be even more anal about it: I would seriously suggest to people that they just _always_ add the "From:" line at the head of the email, even if it just is exactly the same as what will be in the SMTP header.

Why? Simple. It makes is less likely that somebody who just forwards the patch will forget to add that line for you. So you are really helping people out - and making sure the attribution stays correct - by adding that extra "From:" line at the top of your email body, even if it is "unnecessary" in the sense that it's also in your SMTP header.

		Linus

On 22/11/05, Chuck Lever <cel@citi.umich.edu> wrote:

If you import a patch file and don't specify an author (and the patch is not an e-mail), the first Signed-off-by: line is used. As Linus mentioned, we could get rid of this assumption entirely and just report an error if no author information is given.

-- Catalin