On Tue, Nov 07, 2023 at 07:36:44PM +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > I assume what you want out of send-email here is the actual generation
> > of patch emails. But under the hood that is all done by git-format-patch
> > anyway. So for example if you do:
>
> Yeah, most of it is done by format-patch. There are few things I
> actually need from send-email. One of them is generating the Cc from
> the sign-offs and other tags found in the patch.
>
> I had been thinking these days that it would be useful to have
> format-patch generate those. How about adding a --signed-off-by-cc to
> format-patch?
That seems like a reasonable feature. Probably it should be
--cc-from-trailer=signed-off-by, and then you could do the same with
other trailers.
It feels like you could _almost_ do it with the existing
--format='%(trailers)' functionality, but there's no way to say "do the
regular --format=email output, but also stick this extra format in the
headers section". Plus there are probably some niceties you'd get from
Git knowing that you're adding headers (like de-duping addresses).
That feature might end up somewhat hairy, though, as then you get into
questions of parsing address lists, etc. We do all that now in perl with
send-email, where we can lean on some parsing libraries. So I dunno.
> > If you're sending a long series, it's helpful to pre-populate various
> > headers in the format-patch command with "--to", etc. I usually do so by
> > sending the cover letter directly via mutt, and then using some perl
> > hackery to convert those headers into format-patch args. The script I
>
> Indeed, that hackery is what send-email already does, so how about
> moving those features a bit upstream so that format-patch can do them
> too?
Yeah, if they existed in format-patch I might be able to reuse them. I
am hesitant, though, just because handling all the corner cases on
parsing is going to be a bit of new C code.
> Although then, maybe it's simpler to teach send-email to learn to use
> mutt(1) under the hood for the actual send.
I think you will find some corner cases in trying to make mutt act just
like an mta accepting delivery. Two I can think of:
1. It will take a body on stdin, but not a whole message. We can hack
around that with some postponed-folder magic, though.
2. Bcc headers are stripped before sendmail sees the message (but
those addresses appear on the command-line). Converting that back
to bcc so that mutt can then re-strip them would be annoying but
possible. If you don't use bcc, it probably makes sense to just
punt on this.
So maybe a script like this:
-- >8 --
#!/bin/sh
# ignore arguments; mutt will parse them itself
# from to/cc headers. Note that we'll miss bcc this
# way, but handling that would probably be kind of
# tricky; we'd need to re-add those recipients as actual
# bcc headers so that mutt knows how to handle them.
# spool the message to a fake mbox; we need to add
# a "From" line to make it look legit
trap 'rm -f to-send' 0 &&
{
echo "From whatever Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001" &&
cat
} >to-send &&
# and then have mutt "resume" it. We have to redirect
# stdin back from the terminal, since ours is a pipe
# with the message contents.
mutt -p \
-e 'set postponed=to-send' \
-e 'set edit_headers=yes' \
</dev/tty
-- 8< --
and then in your git config:
[sendemail]
sendmailcmd = /path/to/mutt-as-mta.sh
There are mutt-specific bits there that I don't think send-email should
have to know about. Perhaps there are generic options that send-email
could learn, but it really feels like you'd do better teaching mutt to
be more ready to handle this (like taking a whole message on stdin,
headers and all, rather than just a body).
-Peff
