Re: Working with public-inbox.org [Was: [PATCH] rev-parse: respect core.hooksPath in --git-path]

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi Arif,
> 
> On Tue, 23 Aug 2016, Arif Khokar wrote:
> 
> > On 08/20/2016 03:57 PM, Jakub Narębski wrote:
> > 
> > > But perhaps the problem is current lack of tooling in the opposite
> > > direction, namely getting patches from mailing list and applying them
> > > to GitHub repo, or Bitbucket, or GitLab.  Though with working Git, it
> > > is something easier than sending patches via email; it is enough that
> > > email client can save email to a file (or better, whole sub-thread to
> > > file or files).
> > 
> > Given that public-inbox provides an NNTP interface, couldn't the ARTICLE
> > <message-id> NNTP command be used to easily retrieve the messages in a
> > given patch series (at least compared to POP or IMAP).  Perhaps
> > git-send-email could be modified to include the message-id value of each
> > patch in the series that it sends to the mailing list and include it in
> > the cover letter.

I think that makes sense; perhaps an X-Git-Followups: header
from send-email which lists the child Message-IDs the same way
References: does for ancestors.  (perhaps there's already a
standardized header for listing children)

I thought about allowing a giant MIME message with all the
patches attached, too but that won't work for a large patch
series due to size limits along various SMTP hops.
Compression might make spam filters unhappy, too.

> I am no expert in the NNTP protocol (I abandoned News long ago), but if
> you go from HTML, you can automate the process without requiring changes
> in format-patch.
> 
> > Then a script could be written (i.e., git-download-patch) which could
> > parse the cover letter message (specified using its message-id), and
> > download all the patches in series, which can then be applied using
> > git-am.  This would in fact take the email client out of the equation in
> > terms of saving patches.

	w3m -dump -dump_source nntp://<NNTP-server>/<Message-ID>

ought to already work for news.gmane.org and news.public-inbox.org

The Net::NNTP Perl module is a standard part of the Perl distro
for many years, now (along with Net::SMTP), so that would not
be a roadblock for implementing a custom downloader distributed
with git.

> I recently adapted an old script I had to apply an entire patch series
> given the GMane link to its cover letter:
> 
> https://github.com/git-for-windows/build-extra/blob/master/apply-from-gmane.sh
> 
> Maybe you find it in you to adapt that to work with public-inbox.org?

I would be hesitant to depend too much on public-inbox.org until
more mirrors appear.  Even then, NNTP is a better-established
protocol and a fallback to news.gmane still works.
(public-inbox.org is powered by hamsters running on wheels,
 sometimes I let them rest :)