Re: [PATCH] apply: tell user location of corrupted patch file

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

An alternate design was considered which involved printing the line
numbers relative to the output of `git am --show-current-patch` (in
other words, the actual mail file that's provided to am). This design
was not chosen because am does not store the whole mail and instead,
splits the mail into several files. As a result of this, this would
break existing users' workflow if they piped their mail directly to am
from their mail client, the whole mail would not exist in any file and
they would have to manually recreate the mail to see the line number.

More importantly,...

Addendum.

I think the primary reason why the "alternate design" will not fly
is *NOT* that it breaks existing users (which it would), but giving
a line number in the original mbox file is not always possible.

Imagine the message you received was munged by the sending mailer,
or a relaying mailer, and what you received is encoded in base64 ;-)