Hi Denton, Denton Liu <liu.denton@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > 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. This is a good idea. We can default <file> to the target cover letter (e.g., if -v2 is passed, v2-0000-cover-letter.patch or if --numbered-files is passed, 0) if present, or the previous series' cover letter. > 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. Absolutely. > 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`. This is the reason I CCed you! Thanks for your comment, Firmin > > -Denton > > [0]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patch#Documentation/git-format-patch.txt---cover-from-descriptionltmodegt
