Re: Including branch info in git format-patch

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 09:12:52PM +0530, Mukund Sivaraman wrote:

> When i use "git format-patch", it doesn't seem to include the branch (or
> remote) name in the email it creates. So a reader of this mail may not
> know what branch to apply it on to test it. Aside from adding in branch
> information manually in the body of the message, is there any other
> existing way to get git format-patch to include it?

No, there isn't a way to do it automatically. On this mailing list,
patches are assumed to be on top of "master" unless explicitly indicated
otherwise. And we usually just mention it manually.

You could potentially add a config option to put the branch name inside
the '[PATCH]' text. This text is generally stripped away before
applying, so it would still free up the receiver to apply on whatever
branch they wanted. I don't think it would make sense for git
development, since we typically use topic branches, so keeping it
configurable would make sense.

On the receiving end, the applying party could set up their MUA to split
patches based on the subject, and then apply them as appropriate (this
very much depends on their workflow for applying patches). You could
probably even do a pre-applypatch hook as a safety valve to make sure
things were being applied in the right place.

-Peff