I like cover letters, in fact I like them enough to always want --cover-letter to format-patch. The problem with that are patch "series" that are only one patch long, where a cover letter would feel silly. For now, I solved that by using a shell function that wrapped around format-patch and did the trick for me. With this series, format-patch can do it and do it better than my wrapper could. The following setup would suit me pretty well: [format] coverletter = true coveronepatch = false overwritecoverletter = false The series is based on master and doesn't seem to break anything within the test suite. It could maybe use own tests, but I must admit that I didn't look too closely at how git's test suite works and where to put in tests for this. Finally, this series does not change anything about format-patch's default behaviour. Regards, Frank Frank Terbeck (6): format-patch: add cover{letter,onepatch} options The above makes it possible to *always* create cover letters without requesting it via --cover-letter. You can also suppress cover letters for patch series, that are just one patch long, where you'd probably put anything you have to say in addition between '---' and the diffstat. Add documentation for format-patch's --cover-one-patch Document format.coverletter and format.coveronepatch format-patch: introduce overwritecoverletter option When you're always generating cover letters, it can be a good idea to not overwrite an existing cover letter, especially if you're just refreshing your patch series, or added more commits to it - were comments you may have made in an existing cover letter might be valuable for the new patch series as well. Therefore setting overwritecoverletter to false protects you from overwriting an existing cover letter. I had hoped that this change would be possible without changes in so many places, but I didn't see a straight forward one. Add documentation for --cover-overwrite Document format.overwritecoverletter Documentation/config.txt | 15 +++++++++++++ Documentation/git-format-patch.txt | 11 +++++++++ builtin-log.c | 40 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---- log-tree.c | 9 +++++-- log-tree.h | 4 +- 5 files changed, 69 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html