Re: storing cover letter of a patch series?

[Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Is there some other way? Would others be interested in such a feature?
>
> Not me.
>
>> I get very annoyed when I've written a nice long patch cover letter in
>> vim before an email and then realize I should fix something else up,
>> or accidentally cancel it because I didn't use the write "To:" address
>> or something..
>
> I smell a fallout of encouraging a suboptimal workflow made by
> git-send-email here.  If you did not know that the command can drive
> format-patch itself, your workflow would have been:
>
>     $ git format-patch -o my-topic --cover master..my-topic
>     $ vi my-topic/*.txt
>
> and only after you gain confidence with the edited result
>
>     $ git send-email $args my-topic/*.txt
>

I hadn't thought of separating the cover letter from git-send-email.
That would be suitable for me.

> which has no room for your grief/complaint to come into the
> picture.  While rerolling, you can do the same
>
>     $ git format-patch -o my-topic --cover -v2 master..my-topic
>
> and reuse major parts of cover letter from the original round.
>
>> I really think it should be possible to store something somehow as a
>> blob that could be looked up later.
>
> I think "should" is too strong here.  Yes, you could implement that
> way.  It is debatable if it is better, or a flat file kept in a
> directory (my-topic/ in the example above) across rerolls is more
> flexible, lightweight and with less mental burden to the users.

This seems reasonable from an email point of view. Thanks for the insight.

Regards,
Jake