cover letter cc's [was: [PATCH 60/67] hw/s390x: add include directory headers]

cover letter cc's [was: [PATCH 60/67] hw/s390x: add include directory headers]

[Eric Blake]

[adding a cross-post to the git mailing list]

On 05/04/2018 02:10 AM, Cornelia Huck wrote:
> On Thu, 3 May 2018 22:51:40 +0300
> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> This way they are easier to find using standard rules.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
>> ---
...

> [Goes to find cover letter to figure out what this is all about.
> *Please*, cc: people on the cover letter so they can see immediately
> what this is trying to do!]

Is there an EASY way to make 'git format-patch --cover-letter $commitid' 
(and git send-email, by extension) automatically search for all cc's any 
any of the N/M patches, and auto-cc ALL of those recipients on the 0/N 
cover letter?  And if that is not something easily built into git 
format-patch directly, is it something that can easily be added to 
sendemail.cccmd?  This is not the first time that someone has complained 
that automatic cc's are not sending the cover letter context to a 
particular maintainer interested (and auto-cc'd) in only a subset of an 
overall series.

On the other hand, cc'ing all recipients for a largely mechanical patch 
series that was split into 67 parts, in part because it touches so many 
different maintainers' areas, may make the cover letter have so many 
recipients that various mail gateways start rejecting it as potential spam.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

Re: cover letter cc's [was: [PATCH 60/67] hw/s390x: add include directory headers]

[Cornelia Huck]

On Fri, 4 May 2018 08:07:53 -0500
Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> wrote:

> [adding a cross-post to the git mailing list]
> 
> On 05/04/2018 02:10 AM, Cornelia Huck wrote:
> > On Thu, 3 May 2018 22:51:40 +0300
> > "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> This way they are easier to find using standard rules.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
> >> ---  
> ...
> 
> > [Goes to find cover letter to figure out what this is all about.
> > *Please*, cc: people on the cover letter so they can see immediately
> > what this is trying to do!]  
> 
> Is there an EASY way to make 'git format-patch --cover-letter $commitid' 
> (and git send-email, by extension) automatically search for all cc's any 
> any of the N/M patches, and auto-cc ALL of those recipients on the 0/N 
> cover letter?  And if that is not something easily built into git 
> format-patch directly, is it something that can easily be added to 
> sendemail.cccmd?  This is not the first time that someone has complained 
> that automatic cc's are not sending the cover letter context to a 
> particular maintainer interested (and auto-cc'd) in only a subset of an 
> overall series.

I think for most cases where I've been cc:ed on the cover letter and
only some of the patches, people actually added cc: lines to the cover
letter manually.

> 
> On the other hand, cc'ing all recipients for a largely mechanical patch 
> series that was split into 67 parts, in part because it touches so many 
> different maintainers' areas, may make the cover letter have so many 
> recipients that various mail gateways start rejecting it as potential spam.

Yes, large cross-subsystem patch series make this painful.

If I get some patches like "subsystem: frobnicate foo" and it's clear
that it's simply frobnicating foo for various subsystems, I can see
what this is about without reading the cover letter, no need to cc: me.
In this case, however, the patch did not make any sense at all without
looking at the explanation in the cover letter.

So I think we don't want to do this automatically, although some way to
collect potential candidates for cc:ing on the cover letter might be
helpful.

Re: cover letter cc's [was: [PATCH 60/67] hw/s390x: add include directory headers]

[Peter Maydell]

On 4 May 2018 at 14:26, Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 4 May 2018 08:07:53 -0500
> Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> wrote:
>> On the other hand, cc'ing all recipients for a largely mechanical patch
>> series that was split into 67 parts, in part because it touches so many
>> different maintainers' areas, may make the cover letter have so many
>> recipients that various mail gateways start rejecting it as potential spam.
>
> Yes, large cross-subsystem patch series make this painful.

My solution is to either (a) avoid them or (b) not bother cc'ing
people (except people I think might be interested in reviewing
cross-subsystem patchsets like Eric ;-))...

thanks
-- PMM

Re: cover letter cc's [was: [PATCH 60/67] hw/s390x: add include directory headers]

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Fri, May 04, 2018 at 08:07:53AM -0500, Eric Blake wrote:
> [adding a cross-post to the git mailing list]
> 
> On 05/04/2018 02:10 AM, Cornelia Huck wrote:
> > On Thu, 3 May 2018 22:51:40 +0300
> > "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > This way they are easier to find using standard rules.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
> > > ---
> ...
> 
> > [Goes to find cover letter to figure out what this is all about.
> > *Please*, cc: people on the cover letter so they can see immediately
> > what this is trying to do!]
> 
> Is there an EASY way to make 'git format-patch --cover-letter $commitid'
> (and git send-email, by extension) automatically search for all cc's any any
> of the N/M patches, and auto-cc ALL of those recipients on the 0/N cover
> letter?  And if that is not something easily built into git format-patch
> directly, is it something that can easily be added to sendemail.cccmd?  This
> is not the first time that someone has complained that automatic cc's are
> not sending the cover letter context to a particular maintainer interested
> (and auto-cc'd) in only a subset of an overall series.
> 
> On the other hand, cc'ing all recipients for a largely mechanical patch
> series that was split into 67 parts, in part because it touches so many
> different maintainers' areas, may make the cover letter have so many
> recipients that various mail gateways start rejecting it as potential spam.

I do this sometimes (pipe to this script):

grep -e ^Signed-off-by -e ^Acked -e ^Reported -e ^Tested -e ^Cc | sed 's/.*<//'| sed 's/>.*//'|sort | uniq | sed 's/^/Cc: /'


> -- 
> Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
> Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
> Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org