Hi Thomas, Thomas Danckaert <p...@thomasdanckaert.be> writes:
> I don't mind the e-mail-based workflow in principle, and find it has > some advantages, but there are a few practical issues. I'll list my > frustrations, maybe there are concrete solutions for some of them: > > - I find that saving a long patch series from a bunch of e-mails, and > applying them all to a local git checkout is tedious, with a lot of > potential to miss a patch, apply a wrong one, or otherwise screw up > (not to mention patches occasionally get mangled somewhere in the > e-mail pipeline, so git won't apply them). Also, sometimes patches > are in the message body, at other times they are attachments, > ... It *is* a lot of error-prone manual work, compared to just > fetching a branch with git. I think this is where the “glossy > interfaces of Github & co.” do have an advantage. > > Perhaps there are better ways to deal with this, though... Am I > missing some tricks to easily retrieve a bunch of patches from > e-mails, and apply them? Maybe a tutorial by someone who finds the > current workflow comfortable, could already help. In Gnus, with the cursor on the body of a message, you can pipe the patch-in-body using the `|' shortcut or M-x gnus-summary-pipe-output and then giving it the command "git am -s" as Ludovic pointed out some time ago. It works the same if you place the cursor on a MIME (attachment) object. You can also apply multiple patches in a row by giving it a prefix argument (e.g. C-u N |) to apply N patches from N messages (haven't tried that one yet but it's documented, see C-h f gnus-summary-pipe-output). I intend to script this method in Elisp so that would deal with both types of patches (in-body/as-attachment) transparently but haven't gotten around it just yet. I packaged the very old emacs-dvc thinking it could help in doing that but it doesn't, so haven't bothered releasing it. > The other issue is that, in my opinion, the only user-friendly way to > interact with debbugs, is using emacs + debbugs-gnu, once you are > familiar with both. I think that's a really high barrier. > > - I briefly subscribed to the guix-patches mailing list, but found the > volume of e-mail much too high. > - That leaves debbugs. I find the web interface quite terrible, it's > just walls of text you have to find your way through. For example, > Github's “issues” are much more readable (and you can interact with > them via e-mail, too). > - The debbugs emacs interface is quite ok (at least there's a threaded > conversation view), although now you have to learn to use Gnus if > you want to participate in the conversation. I can highly recommend Gnus to get some hold of high mailing list traffic. Expiry is a nifty way to storm through the mails, and there's always the last resort 'c' catchup that will put you back on top of things after coming back from a long weekend. Maxim
