Re: storing cover letter of a patch series?

[Simon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>]

Hi Jacob,

On 11 September 2015 at 02:30, Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

If you do end up trying it out I'd appreciate any feedback you have.
I've sent 1000s of patches through it over the past few years.

Regards,
Simon