Hi Felipe, On Thu, May 06, 2021 at 08:46:16PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: > Firmin Martin wrote: > > 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. 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. > 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`. -Denton [0]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patch#Documentation/git-format-patch.txt---cover-from-descriptionltmodegt
