Denton Liu wrote: > 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. 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? > > 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
