Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> 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 ;-)
