Re: [PATCH RFC] git-send-email --expand-aliases

Alex Chiang [off-list ref] writes:

I'm an StGit user, and while StGit has its own 'stg mail'
feature, it doesn't know how to expand email aliases (yet).

Certainly, one way to solve that problem would be to hack stgit
so that it can parse alias files, but to me, that seems silly
when git-send-email can already do that.

This patch teaches git-send-email to only expand email addresses
so that other git porcelains don't have to roll their own mail
alias parsers.

Certainly, one way to solve that would be to hack _both_ stgit and
send-email so that the former runs the latter _only_ to ask for the
expansion and then send the message out, but to me, that seems silly
when git-send-email can already do both expanding aliases and sending
the message ;-)

If you are changing StGit to call git-send-email anyway, why not arrange
stgit to call git-send-email to send the message out instead, instead of
sending messages on its own?

I imagine the internal implementation of stg mail to work
something like:

	call git-send-email --expand-aliases repeatedly, once for
	all the combined --to= args, then for all the combined --cc= args,
	and finally for all the combined --bcc= args (all passed
	to stg mail), read from stdout until EOF

I imagine the internal implementation of stg mail would work something
like:

    prepare messages to send out
    call git-send-email and have it send them

What am I missing?