From: Luca Ceresoli <luca.ceresoli@bootlin.com>
To: tools@kernel.org
Cc: "Alexis Lothoré" <alexis.lothore@bootlin.com>
Subject: b4: feature request: send cover as separate e-mail even for a single patch
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2025 11:38:55 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20250619113855.6a271fa6@booty> (raw)
Hello,
first and foremost: b4 is awesome, thank you!
A fixed behaviour of b4 is that when a series to be sent has only one
patch the cover letter is sent in the [PATCH 1/1] mail itself, under
the '---' separator, instead of a separate [PATCH 0/1] mail.
While I'm happy with this policy for simple self-standing patches that
do not need a cover, I find it annoying for other cases, such as:
* a new iteration of a multi-patch series [0] where all patches except
one have been applied (or dropped), so the series has become a
one-patch: keeping the cover letter separate would make it
consistent with the previous iterations
* a single patch [1] that is not obvious, so a cover letter is used to
provide the context, high-level view of a larger topic, etc
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250528-drm-bridge-convert-to-alloc-api-v4-1-f04e698c9a77@bootlin.com/
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250618-btf_skip_structs_on_stack-v1-1-e70be639cc53@bootlin.com/
I think both policies should be allowed, under user control. The user
interface to control it should include some of the following, in order
of necessity:
* a command line flag for 'b4 send' to manually control which policy is
desired each time a series is sent
* a per-series parameter, saved within the JSON parameters in the
cover letter commit, so the policy is consistent across iterations
* a configuration parameter to set the default policy in lack of the
two above
I tried some hacks in the b4 code to draft this feature but I just ended
up in breaking other things, so I reached out here for more informed
opinions.
Thanks for considering this addition to b4.
Best regards,
Luca
--
Luca Ceresoli, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com
next reply other threads:[~2025-06-19 9:39 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2025-06-19 9:38 Luca Ceresoli [this message]
2026-01-28 18:52 ` b4: feature request: send cover as separate e-mail even for a single patch Breno Leitao
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