Re: b4 cover-letter in single patch submission

[Mattijs Korpershoek <mkorpershoek@baylibre.com>]

On ven., oct. 07, 2022 at 14:08, Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 04, 2022 at 12:08:36PM +0200, Amjad Ouled-Ameur wrote:
>> Hi Konstantin,
>> 
>> I have tried v0.10.1, cover letter is no longer sent when dealing with a
>> single patch, thank you for the fix. However, the cover letter is instead
>> embedded into the "under-the-cut" portion of the patch, this means the user
>> still has to unnecessary fill the cover letter ; because keeping the cover
>> template as-is will result into "b4 send" failing. My suggestion is not
>> include the cover's title and description into the patch, I think keeping
>> only "base-commit" and "change-id" is enough.
>
> I felt there were good reasons to go with the solution that I put in place,
> specifically:
>
> 1. keeping a separate cover letter makes it easy to keep track of changelog
>    entries
> 2. breaking a single patch up into multiple patches is a very common feedback

I agree with Konstantin on this. I've used b4 for single patch sending
as well and to me it works well the way it is today:
* changelog (for the single patch) is done in the separate commit
* changelog is then appended

I do remove the "commit title" from the cover letter commit to have a
better overall format.

>
> One of the biggest problems I'm trying to deal with right now is the fact that
> cover letters are so free-form. When we encounter a cover letter format that
> we don't recognize, we're likely to do something wrong.
>
> I'm considering enforcing the cover letter format to be more rigid -- at least
> when managed by b4, but I'm likely to encounter resistance from users.
>
> -K