Re: [PATCH 2/2] format-patch: --inline-single

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 08:47:39AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> >> ... <helper function to see if the user is the author> ...
> >> +}
> >
> > Nice, I'm glad you handled this case properly. I've wondered if we
> > should have an option to do a similar test when writing out the "real"
> > message format. I.e., to put the extra "From" line in the body of the
> > message when !is_current_user(). Traditionally we have just said "that
> > is the responsibility of the MUA you use", and let send-email handle it.
> > But it means people who do not use send-email have to reimplement the
> > feature themselves.
> 
> I am not sure if I follow.  Do you mean that you have to remove
> fewer lines if you omit Date/From when it is from you in the first
> place?

Sorry, I think I confused you by going off on a tangent. The rest of my
email was about dropping unnecessary lines from the inline view.  But
here I was talking about another possible use of the "is user the
author" function. For the existing view, we show:

  From: A U Thor <author@example.com>
  Date: ...
  Subject: [PATCH] whatever

  body

and if committer != author, we expect the MUA to convert that to:

  From: C O Mitter <committer@example.com>
  Date: ...
  Subject: [PATCH] whatever

  From: A U Thor <author@example.com>

  body

That logic happens in git-send-email right now, but given that your
patch adds the "are we the author?" function, it would be trivial to add
a "--sender-is-committer" option to format-patch to have it do it
automatically. That saves the MUA from having to worry about it.

> People who do not use send-email (like me) slurp the output
> 0001-have-gostak-distim-doshes.patch into their MUA editor, tell the
> MUA to use the contents on the Subject: line as the subject, and
> remove what is redundant, including the Subject.  Because the output
> cannot be used as-is anyway, I do not think it is such a big deal.

That is one way to do it. Another way is to hand the output of
format-patch to your MUA as a template, making it a starting point for a
message we are about to send. No manual editing is necessary in that
case, unless the "From" header does not match the sender identity.

> And those who have a custom mechanism to stuff our output in their
> MUA's outbox, similar to what imap-send does, would already have to
> have a trivial parser to read the first part of our output up to the
> first blank line (i.e. parsing out the header part) and formatting
> the information it finds into a form that is understood by their
> MUA.

Not necessarily. The existing format is an rfc822 message, which mailers
understand already. It's perfectly cromulent to do:

  git format-patch --stdout "$@" >mbox &&
  mutt -f mbox

and use mutt's "resend-message" as a starting point for sending each
message. No editing is necessary except for adding recipients (which you
can also do on the command-line to format-patch).

> Omitting From: or Date: lines would not help those people who
> already have established the procedure to handle the "Oh, this one
> is from me" case, or to send the output always with the Sender: and
> keeping the From: intact.  So,...

Right, my point was to help people who _should_ have implemented the
"oh, this one is from me" case, but were too lazy to do so (and it's
actually a little tricky to get right, because you might have to adjust
the mime headers to account for encoded author names).

-Peff