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

[Arif Khokar <arif.i.khokar@gmail.com>]

On 02/13/2017 09:37 AM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi Arif,
>
> On Mon, 13 Feb 2017, Arif Khokar wrote:

>> Thanks for the link.  One thing that comes to mind that is that it may
>> be better to just download the patches and then manually apply them
>> afterwords rather than doing it in the script itself.  Or at least add
>> an option to the script to not automatically invoke git am.
>
> I actually had expected *you* to put in a little bit of an effort, too. In
> fact, I was very disappointed that you did not even look into porting that
> script to use public-inbox instead of GMane.

I wasn't aware of that expectation.  My idea was to use NNTP as a way to 
facilitate the development of a new git utility that would serve as the 
inverse of git-send-email (sort of like the relationship between git 
format-patch and git am), rather than using a

IIRC, I had posted some proof-of-concept Perl code to do so back in 
August in 
<DM5PR17MB1353B99EBD5F4FD23360DD41D3ED0@DM5PR17MB1353.namprd17.prod.outlook.com>

Looking at public-inbox now at the archives of this group, it appears 
that several of the messages I sent weren't archived for some reason 
(and I didn't see any more responses to what I posted at the time).  The 
messages are accessible via NNTP when connecting to gmane though.

Also, looking at the source of the message I referenced, it appears that 
my MUA decided to base64 encode the message for some reason (which may 
have resulted in it getting filtered by those who I sent the message to).

I will look into this more now (given yours and Junio's responses).

>> Getting back to the point I made when this thread was still active, I
>> still think it would be better to be able to list the message-id values
>> in the header or body of the cover letter message of a patch series
>> (preferably the former) in order to facilitate downloading the patches
>> via NNTP from gmane or public-inbox.org.  That would make it easier
>> compared to the different, ad-hoc, methods that exist for each email
>> client.
>
> You can always do that yourself: you can modify your cover letter to
> include that information.

Certainly, but it would be nice to be able to have it done automatically 
by git format-patch (which I'll look into).

> Note that doing this automatically in format-patch may not be appropriate,
> as 1) the Message-ID could be modified depending on the mail client used
> to send the mails

I think the best approach would be not to make including the message-id 
values the default behavior.  Specifying a new command-line option to 
enable that behavior should address those concerns I think.

> and 2) it is not unheard of that a developer
> finds a bug in the middle of sending a patch series, fixes that bug, and
> regenerates the remainder of the patch series, completely rewriting those
> Message-IDs.

Perhaps, but should something like that not warrant a re-roll of sorts. 
That is, one should reply to the partial patch series stating that there 
is a bug that renders this particular patch (series) un-usable and the 
re-roll could be posted as a reply to the original cover letter?

>> Alternatively, or perhaps in addition to the list of message-ids, a list
>> of URLs to public-inbox.org or gmane messages could also be provided for
>> those who prefer to download patches via HTTP.
>
> At this point, I am a little disinterested in a discussion without code. I
> brought some code to the table, after all.

If you have the time, please take a look at the message-id I referenced. 
  If you need, I can re-post the proof-of-concept code.