Re: storing cover letter of a patch series?

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 9:28 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?

Being late to this thread, but I think

       branch.<name>.description
           Branch description, can be edited with git branch
           --edit-description. Branch description is automatically added in
           the format-patch cover letter or request-pull summary.

is what you want. Maybe we want to see a patch that adds the reverse
functionality as well, i.e. git-am will store the the cover letter as the
branch description and git-merge will propose the branch description for
the merge commit.

>
> 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.

I agree here. I personally do not use that variable (yet), as it doesn't seem
to be editable easily.
So here is what I do:
1) First series is generated with format-patch --cover-letter
2) any following v{2,3,4} is generated without the cover-letter but with
  --subject-prefix=PATCHv{2,3,4}
3) the cover letter is manually edited to be the next version and a section
  is added why the next version of the series is sent.

>
> 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?
>
> Regards,
> Jake
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