Re: Let me ask again: How do we import patches from non-git sources?

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 09:27:33AM -0700, Marc Singer wrote:

On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 13:54 -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

quoted

Based on my notes from the last time I needed to feed a bunch of
non-mbox, non-git-produced patches into git-am, the hard part was
figuring out how it split a file into separate messages; my notes say:

	"Finds lines begining with "From " and ending with "hh:mm:ss
	yyyy".  See builtin-mailsplit code for more details."

Other than that, I think it just needs and From: and Subject: lines to
get author and first-line of the commit.  the git-am man page has some
documentation of this.  It could probably use more.

I'm not sure that I understand your response. 

git-am complains that it cannot find an email address, but raw patches
seldom have these.  So, either we could use another command, or it would
be handy if we could supply the email address to git-am (or some other
data it needs so that it can split the patch.)  I suppose the mistaken
assumption is that the patch source in an email instead of already being
a nice clean patch.

I think it's intentional.  You need some standard format git-am can use
to split out the patches and find the comments and the authorship
information (for the Author: field on the commit), so why not just use
something like mbox?

And it could provide some fallback for the "Author:" information in the
case where it didn't find that, but we wouldn't want that to be the
default if it meant risking silently losing authorship information.  I
suppose an "--author" option to git-am might be convenient sometimes.

But personally I always just add those headers by hand (or with a
script).  It's not that hard; I the minimum required is just three
lines, I think:

	From git-owner@vger.kernel.org Tue jun 12 11:43:40 2007
	From: someone [off-list ref]
	Subject: [PATCH] do something
	
	Do something complicated.
	
	---
	
	diff a/foo b/foo
	...

And often I need different authors on different patches anyway, so
git-am --author wouldn't help.

Of course if you've just got one patch to import, you can git-apply and
then commit.

--b.

(PS: Standard practice around here is to leave people on the To: and/or
Cc: lines when you reply, and for me at least that'd be easier.)