On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 02:37:04PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Josh Triplett <j...@joshtriplett.org> writes: > > > I'd like to propose changing the default behavior of git-format-patch to > > --from (and adding a --from-author option to override, and perhaps a > > config setting). This will not change the output *except* when > > formatting patches authored by someone else. git-am and git-send-email > > both handle the --from format without any issues. > > I see this in "format-patch --help": > > Note that this option is only useful if you are actually > sending the emails and want to identify yourself as the > sender, but retain the original author (and git am will > correctly pick up the in-body header). Note also that > git send-email already handles this transformation for > you, and this option should not be used if you are > feeding the result to git send-email. > > The first one says "only useful", but it seems what it really means > is "it becomes no-op if you are sending your own patch anyway". So > that one does not worry me. What is most worrysome is the latter > half of the last sentence. Is it really "should not be", or is it > merely "use of this option is just a waste of time, as you would get > exactly the same result anyway"? If it is the latter, that is fine.
It does what you want, and omits the in-body header when it would be redundant. I think the original reason I did not make "--from" the default is that I was worried about breaking consumers which do not know how to handle in-body headers. "git am" knows how to handle them, but if you have a one-off script that parses only the mail headers, it will start claiming you as the author of every patch. E.g., if you do: git format-patch -o output ... grep -hm1 ^From: output/* right now that gets you a list of patch authors. With "--from", it would return your name N times. That's obviously a toy, but I wonder if people have scripts which behave similarly. Another way to think about it is that "--from" is a no-brainer when you really are going to email the patches (and that's why it is has always been the default behavior in git-send-email). But if you _aren't_ going to mail the patches, retaining the original headers is more convenient. It's not clear to me how many non-mail users of format-patch there are (certainly rebase is one of them, but because it uses "am" on the receiving side, I think everything should Just Work). -Peff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
