On Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 03:37:39PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > On the other hand, I am not sure what is wrong with "after the user > typed", actually. As you said, anybody sane would be using --to (or > an equivalent configuration variable in the repository) to send > their patches to the project address instead of typing, and to them > it is not a problem. After getting the recipient address from the > end user, the validation may fail due to a wrong address, in which > case it is a good thing. If the validation failed due to wrong > contents of the patch (perhaps it included a change to the file with > trade secret that appeared in the context lines), as long as the > reason why the validation hook rejected the patches is clear enough > (e.g., "it's the patches, not the recipients"), such "a rejection > after typing" would be only once per a patch series, so it does not > sound too bad, either. > > But perhaps I am not seeing the reason why "fail after the user typed" > is so disliked and being unnecessarily unsympathetic. I dunno. I did not look carefully at the flow of send-email, so this may or may not be an issue. But what I think would be _really_ annoying is if you asked to write a cover letter, went through the trouble of writing it, and then send-email bailed due to some validation failure that could have been checked earlier. There is probably a way to recover your work (presumably we leave it in a temporary file somewhere), but it may not be entirely trivial, especially for users who are not comfortable with advanced usage of their editor. ;) I seem to remember we had one or two such problems in the early days with "git commit", where you would go to the trouble to type a commit message only to bail on some condition which _could_ have been checked earlier. You can recover the message from .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG, but you need to remember to do so before re-invoking "git commit", otherwise it gets obliterated. Now for send-email, if your flow is to generate the patches with "format-patch", then edit the cover letter separately, and then finally ship it all out with "send-email", that might not be an issue. But some workflows use the --compose option instead. -Peff
