Re: [PATCH] Teach fmt-patch to write individual files.

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

When called with "--stdout", it still writes to standard output.

Notable differences to git-format-patch:

	- since fmt-patch uses the standardized logging machinery, it is
	  no longer "From nobody", but "From <commit_sha1>",

Yes, and the date on that UNIX-From line has been updated ;-).

	- the empty lines before and after the "---" just before the
	  diffstat are no longer there,

Personally, I find this the most annoying myself.  I am not
complaining to you because as you know you inherited this
behaviour from my code.

	- git-format-patch outputs the commit_sha1 just before the first
	  diff, which fmt-patch does not,

Which should be fine.

	- the file names are no longer output to stdout, but to stderr
	  (since stdout is freopen()ed all the time), and

Which might be a bigger deal; I suspect people capture that while
dumping patches into individual files, and do their
postprocessing using the list of filenames.

	- "git fmt-patch HEAD^" does not work as expected: it outputs
	  *all* commits reachable from HEAD^!

If we really wanted to handle this, you could do something like
what builtin-diff does before letting the revision machinery
start walking the revision tree.  Look at pending objects, and
if you find only one UNINTERESTING commit, add_object the
current HEAD there as well.  Personally I do not think it is
worth it; rather we would probably want to standardize on rev-list
syntax.

Two major differences you forgot to mention.

One is that it does not do the "git cherry" filtering.  It is
not a big deal for me personally, but some people may be
depending on it.  I dunno.

Another is -o outdir, which should be trivial to add once you
have implemented output switching with freopen().

Anyhow, thanks for starting this.