Re: [PATCH 2/2] format-patch: --inline-single

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 08:47:39AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

... <helper function to see if the user is the author> ...
+}

Nice, I'm glad you handled this case properly. I've wondered if we
should have an option to do a similar test when writing out the "real"
message format. I.e., to put the extra "From" line in the body of the
message when !is_current_user(). Traditionally we have just said "that
is the responsibility of the MUA you use", and let send-email handle it.
But it means people who do not use send-email have to reimplement the
feature themselves.

I am not sure if I follow.  Do you mean that you have to remove
fewer lines if you omit Date/From when it is from you in the first
place?

Sorry, I think I confused you by going off on a tangent. The rest of my
email was about dropping unnecessary lines from the inline view.  But
here I was talking about another possible use of the "is user the
author" function. For the existing view, we show:

  From: A U Thor [off-list ref]
  Date: ...
  Subject: [PATCH] whatever

  body

and if committer != author, we expect the MUA to convert that to:

  From: C O Mitter [off-list ref]
  Date: ...
  Subject: [PATCH] whatever

  From: A U Thor [off-list ref]

  body

That logic happens in git-send-email right now, but given that your
patch adds the "are we the author?" function, it would be trivial to add
a "--sender-is-committer" option to format-patch to have it do it
automatically. That saves the MUA from having to worry about it.

People who do not use send-email (like me) slurp the output
0001-have-gostak-distim-doshes.patch into their MUA editor, tell the
MUA to use the contents on the Subject: line as the subject, and
remove what is redundant, including the Subject.  Because the output
cannot be used as-is anyway, I do not think it is such a big deal.

That is one way to do it. Another way is to hand the output of
format-patch to your MUA as a template, making it a starting point for a
message we are about to send. No manual editing is necessary in that
case, unless the "From" header does not match the sender identity.

And those who have a custom mechanism to stuff our output in their
MUA's outbox, similar to what imap-send does, would already have to
have a trivial parser to read the first part of our output up to the
first blank line (i.e. parsing out the header part) and formatting
the information it finds into a form that is understood by their
MUA.

Not necessarily. The existing format is an rfc822 message, which mailers
understand already. It's perfectly cromulent to do:

  git format-patch --stdout "$@" >mbox &&
  mutt -f mbox

and use mutt's "resend-message" as a starting point for sending each
message. No editing is necessary except for adding recipients (which you
can also do on the command-line to format-patch).

Omitting From: or Date: lines would not help those people who
already have established the procedure to handle the "Oh, this one
is from me" case, or to send the output always with the Sender: and
keeping the From: intact.  So,...

Right, my point was to help people who _should_ have implemented the
"oh, this one is from me" case, but were too lazy to do so (and it's
actually a little tricky to get right, because you might have to adjust
the mime headers to account for encoded author names).

-Peff