Re: [PATCH] send-email: move process_address_list earlier to avoid, uninitialized address error

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 03:37:39PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> On the other hand, I am not sure what is wrong with "after the user
> typed", actually.  As you said, anybody sane would be using --to (or
> an equivalent configuration variable in the repository) to send
> their patches to the project address instead of typing, and to them
> it is not a problem.  After getting the recipient address from the
> end user, the validation may fail due to a wrong address, in which
> case it is a good thing.  If the validation failed due to wrong
> contents of the patch (perhaps it included a change to the file with
> trade secret that appeared in the context lines), as long as the
> reason why the validation hook rejected the patches is clear enough
> (e.g., "it's the patches, not the recipients"), such "a rejection
> after typing" would be only once per a patch series, so it does not
> sound too bad, either.
> 
> But perhaps I am not seeing the reason why "fail after the user typed"
> is so disliked and being unnecessarily unsympathetic.  I dunno.

I did not look carefully at the flow of send-email, so this may or may
not be an issue. But what I think would be _really_ annoying is if you
asked to write a cover letter, went through the trouble of writing it,
and then send-email bailed due to some validation failure that could
have been checked earlier.

There is probably a way to recover your work (presumably we leave it in
a temporary file somewhere), but it may not be entirely trivial,
especially for users who are not comfortable with advanced usage of
their editor. ;)

I seem to remember we had one or two such problems in the early days
with "git commit", where you would go to the trouble to type a commit
message only to bail on some condition which _could_ have been checked
earlier. You can recover the message from .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG, but you
need to remember to do so before re-invoking "git commit", otherwise it
gets obliterated.

Now for send-email, if your flow is to generate the patches with
"format-patch", then edit the cover letter separately, and then finally
ship it all out with "send-email", that might not be an issue. But some
workflows use the --compose option instead.

-Peff