Re: [PATCH v1 0/8] format-patch: introduce --confirm-overwrite

Denton Liu wrote:

Hi Felipe,

On Thu, May 06, 2021 at 08:46:16PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

quoted

Firmin Martin wrote:

quoted

Currently, git-format-patch, along with the option --cover-letter,
unconditionally overwrites a cover letter with the same name (if
present). Although this is a desired behaviour for patches which are
auto-generated from Git commits log, it might not be the case for a
cover letter whose the content is meticulously written manually.

This is one of the reasons I never use git format-patch directly, but I
use a tool on top: git send-series[1].

It seems like everyone has written some sort of tooling on top of
format-patch at this point. Taking a cursory look at your tool, perhaps
a feature like `--previous-cover-letter <file>` might provide most of
the functionality that most tooling that I've seen gives.

If that worked correctly, maybe, but not for my tool.

Some of the features still missing:

 * List of people to cc
 * refs of where the branch was in vX
 * Automatic rangediff
 * Storing other metadata like last Message-Id

Perhaps this option could parse a cover letter from a previous version
of a patch and use it to populate the next version number, In-Reply-To,
cover letter subject/body, To/Cc lists and maybe more. I think that
extracting the information would be pretty easy but designing the UI it
in a non-obtuse way would be pretty challenging.

Where would you put the Cc list for example?

quoted

It would be nice if git format-patch grabbed the text of the body from
somewhere, and even better if git branch learned --edit-cover-letter.

Well, you're in luck! I wanted the same thing a couple of years back so
I implemented the --cover-from-description option[0]. It allows the cover
letter to be populated by the text given in
`git branch --edit-description`.

I did see --cover-from-description and thought of making use of it on my
tool, but I thought it only updated the subject of the cover-letter. Now
I see --cover-from-description=subject does exactly what I would want.
Nice! Although I've no idea why that option is called "subject".

My only comment is: why doesn't --cover-from-description do something
useful?

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras