Re: [PATCH 1/2] format-patch: fix dashdash usage

["Björn Steinbrink" <B.Steinbrink@gmx.de>]

On 2009.11.26 15:11:27 -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> >> I actually have a bigger question, though.  Does it even make sense to
> >> allow pathspecs to format-patch?  We sure are currently loose and take
> >> them, but I doubt it is by design.
> >
> > Not everyone has clean branches only with pertinent patches.
> >
> > I stumbled upon this trying to re-create (cleanly) a "branch" that was
> > constantly merged into another "master" branch that had a lot more
> > stuff. Maybe there was a smarter way to do that with 'git rebase', but
> > that doesn't mean format-patch -- <path> shouldn't work.
> >
> >> The patch itself looks good and is a candidate 'maint' material, if the
> >> answer to the above question is a convincing "yes, because ...".
> >
> > Yeah, I also think this should go into 'maint'.
> 
> Hmm, I have not seen a clear "yes, because..." yet.
> 
> For one thing, Documentation/git-format-patch.txt does not even hint that
> you can give pathspecs.  builtin_format_patch_usage[] doesn't, either.  As
> I wrote the initial version of format-patch I can say with some authority
> that use with pathspecs were never meant to be supported---if it works, it
> works by accident, giving long enough rope to users to potentially cause
> themselves harm.
> 
> I am inclined to think that we shouldn't encourage use of pathspecs (just
> like we never encouraged use of options like --name-only that never makes
> sense in the context of the command) but I am undecided if we also should
> forbid the use of pathspecs (just like we did for --name-only recently).

A year ago, there was someone who had done a subtree merge and had
commits that changed the subtree in the "supertree" branch. He wanted to
generate patches to send them to upstream, and ended up using
format-patch with --relative and pathspecs.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/101742

I guess this could be done by some "git rebase -s subtree ..."
invocation though, to first get commits that sit directly on the subtree
branch, and then you could turn them into patches as usual... Hmm..

Björn