Re: Re*: [PATCH v9] Documentation/remote-helpers: Add invocation section

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net> writes:

> I'm wondering how necessary that flipping of to and cc is. It means one
> has to switch one's send-email config between RFCs and actual patches.

This was my thinko.  "An ideal patch flow" says the final submission still
goes to the list with maintainer on the Cc: line, and that is fine with
me.

> It also means I should send fewer patches to you (Junio) directly (in
> addition to cc'ing the list), which is probably the intention :)

That, and more importantly, less uncooked patches hitting my mailbox with
me as an addressee, was an important goal.  I need to deal with patch
e-mails in three different ways:

 (0) just read as a bystander without much interesting input from my side;
 (1) read and comment for improvement; or
 (2) act on it by applying.

I was hoping if we can have some way for me to sift (2) from others
without adding extra burden on the contributors.

One way to reduce (1) I've been experimenting with is not to comment on
too many threads.  The theory is that the initial rfc patch hopefully does
not have my address on To/Cc, but once I comment on a patch, follow-up
patches will be posted with address of everybody involved in the
discussion Cc:ed to the thread (which by the way is a good practice and I
do not want people to break it), and my "grep for patch messages with my
address on it" trick to find the finalized patches will not work well.

But that strategy does not work very well for another reason: we lose one
reviewer if I try to comment on patches as little as possible, and we do
not have enough people who read other's patches and help polishing to
afford that.