Re: [PATCH] git-am: Handle "git show" output correctly

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Dan Johnson [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

Not really.  If we start encouraging people to use "git show" output
as a kosher input to "am", we would have to support such use
forever, and we end up painting ourselves in a corner we cannot get
out of easily.

If git am emitted a warning when accepting "git show" output, it seems
like it would support Peter's use-case without encouraging bad
behavior?

Are you seriously suggesting me to sell to our users a new feature
saying "this does not work reliably, we would not recommend using
it, no, really, don't trust it." from the day the feature is
introduced, especially when we know it will not be "the feature does
not work well yet, but it will, we promise" but is "and it may become
worse in the future"?

I do not see much point in doing that.

Fair enough.

Besides, what bad behaviour do we avoid from encouraging with such
an approach?  As Peter said, the problem is not on the part of the
user who ended up with an output from "git show", when he really
wants output from "git format-patch".  Giving the warning to the
user of "git am" is too late.

I was assuming Peter would accept the patch, and reply with a "in the
future, please submit the output of format-patch", thus correcting the
submitter's behavior. This warning would serve someone who did not
know that they wanted the output of format-patch, and hopefully teach
them to send such a reply message.

I may be able to be pursuaded to swallow a new script somewhere in
the contrib/ hierarchy that takes a "git show" output and formats it
to look like "format-patch" output to be fed to "git am".  That way,
when a user has trouble with its parsing of "git show" output, at
least we can ask for the output of the format massaging step to help
us diagnose where the problem lies.

That sounds like a better approach to me as well.

-- 
-Dan