Re: storing cover letter of a patch series?

[Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 4:28 AM, Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> does anyone know of any tricks for storing a cover letter for a patch
> series inside of git somehow? I'd guess the only obvious way currently
> is to store it at the top of the series as an empty commit.. but this
> doesn't get emailed *as* the cover letter...
>
> Is there some other way? Would others be interested in such a feature?
>
> 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 really think it should be possible to store something somehow as a
> blob that could be looked up later. Even if this was a slightly more
> manual process that would be helpful to store the message inside git
> itself.
>
> In addition, this would help re-rolls since it would mean if I go back
> to a topic and re-roll it I can just update the message. If it were
> properly stored in my local history that would also mean I could see
> revisions on it.
>
> Any thoughts on how to do this?
>

A bit of a plug for patman[1] which the u-boot project uses (although
there's nothing u-boot specific about it). It lets you put the cover
letter and other meta information in the commit messages as you go
then will extract that information and generate a cover letter and
clean patches. As of fairly recently it's also installable as a
standalone application.

--
[1] - http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=blob;f=tools/patman/README