Re: [PATCH v1 0/8] format-patch: introduce --confirm-overwrite

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
To: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>,
	Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Cc: Firmin Martin <firminmartin24@gmail.com>,
	git@vger.kernel.org, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>,
	Jeff King <peff@peff.net>,
	Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmail.com>,
	Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1 0/8] format-patch: introduce --confirm-overwrite
Date: Tue, 11 May 2021 00:03:03 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <609a1007ec851_5b0e1208e5@natae.notmuch> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <YJUAmUJiHmJRQBMj@generichostname>

Denton Liu wrote:
> Hi Felipe,
> 
> On Thu, May 06, 2021 at 08:46:16PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> > Firmin Martin wrote:
> > > Currently, git-format-patch, along with the option --cover-letter,
> > > unconditionally overwrites a cover letter with the same name (if
> > > present). Although this is a desired behaviour for patches which are
> > > auto-generated from Git commits log, it might not be the case for a
> > > cover letter whose the content is meticulously written manually.
> > 
> > This is one of the reasons I never use git format-patch directly, but I
> > use a tool on top: git send-series[1].
> 
> It seems like everyone has written some sort of tooling on top of
> format-patch at this point. Taking a cursory look at your tool, perhaps
> a feature like `--previous-cover-letter <file>` might provide most of
> the functionality that most tooling that I've seen gives.

If that worked correctly, maybe, but not for my tool.

Some of the features still missing:

 * List of people to cc
 * refs of where the branch was in vX
 * Automatic rangediff
 * Storing other metadata like last Message-Id

> Perhaps this option could parse a cover letter from a previous version
> of a patch and use it to populate the next version number, In-Reply-To,
> cover letter subject/body, To/Cc lists and maybe more. I think that
> extracting the information would be pretty easy but designing the UI it
> in a non-obtuse way would be pretty challenging.

Where would you put the Cc list for example?

> > It would be nice if git format-patch grabbed the text of the body from
> > somewhere, and even better if git branch learned --edit-cover-letter.
> 
> Well, you're in luck! I wanted the same thing a couple of years back so
> I implemented the --cover-from-description option[0]. It allows the cover
> letter to be populated by the text given in
> `git branch --edit-description`.

I did see --cover-from-description and thought of making use of it on my
tool, but I thought it only updated the subject of the cover-letter. Now
I see --cover-from-description=subject does exactly what I would want.
Nice! Although I've no idea why that option is called "subject".

My only comment is: why doesn't --cover-from-description do something
useful?

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras