Re: git send-email should not allow 'y' for in-reply-to

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 09:39:06AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote:

> > Please don't answer "y" when git send email shows the following prompt:
> > 
> > "Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first email?"
> > 
> > you should respond with a message ID there. Unfortunately we have a
> > growing thread that contains submissions with this mistake.
> 
> Anyone willing to patch upstream 'git send-email' to reject a simple 'y'
> rather than blindly sending a bad messageID for the in-reply-to field,
> to help future users avoid this mistake?  Obviously, it won't help until
> the patch eventually percolates into distros, so it would be a few more
> months before we see the benefits, but down the road it will prevent
> confusing threads.

What version of git? Commit 51bbccf is in v1.7.12.1 and higher, and
says:

  $ git show 51bbccf
  commit 51bbccfd1b4a9e2807413022c56ab05c835164fb
  Author: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
  Date:   Tue Aug 14 15:15:53 2012 -0700

  send-email: validate & reconfirm interactive responses

  People answer 'y' to "Who should the emails appear to be from?"  and
  'n' to "Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first email?"
  for some unknown reason.  While it is possible that your local
  username really is "y" and you are sending the mail to your local
  colleagues, it is possible, and some might even say it is likely,
  that it is a user error.

  Fortunately, our interactive prompter already has input validation
  mechanism built-in.  Enhance it so that we can optionally reconfirm
  and allow the user to pass an input that does not validate, and
  "softly" require input to the sender, in-reply-to, and recipient to
  contain "@" and "." in this order, which would catch most cases of
  mistakes.

-Peff