Re: [PATCH 1/2] format-patch: Add a signature option (--signature)

[Stephen Boyd <bebarino@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Theodore Tso <tytso@MIT.EDU> writes:
>
>>
>> I don't know how important people will feel this to be, but I've occasionally
>> found it interesting to see how many people are using various different
>> versions of git in a particular development community, and having the
>> version in the signature is a useful gauge on that.
>
> The original motivation of the version signature was exactly that ;-).
>

At least with git send-email you get the X-Mailer header and you know
what version is being used. I admit that isn't as visible/useful as
the signature though and not everyone is using git send-email.

>
> I think you misread Stephen, he misspoke, or I misread the patch.  The
> intention of the change as I understand it is to put the signature in the
> cover letter, in addition to the patches.
>

Yes, this is one intention. The other intention is to allow me to
customize what that signature is (or to have no signature at all).
Currently it replaces the version number.

The other option is appending the signature to the version number, but
I thought it looked funny:

    --
    1.7.0

    Signature goes here

but now that I look at it again maybe it looks ok.

If the answer is there should always be the version number in the
signature then renaming --signature to --custom-signature or
--extra-signature or --append-signature would be more clear (albeit
verbose). Then  --no-*-signature wouldn't imply that you are removing
the default version signature (because you can't).

If the signature is causing problems for third-party tools then maybe
in some projects they wouldn't want the signature at all and
--no-signature would be a good option there. It doesn't mean we have
to add a --signature=<str> option too, instead it could just be a
boolean option.

The real question is how useful is it to have the version number
there? There are other ways to gauge the version usage and it's opt-in
so you'll still get some version number coverage.