Re: [BUG] "--show-current-patch" return a mail instead of a patch

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jerome Pouiller <Jerome.Pouiller@silabs.com> writes:

> Hello all,
>
> I try to use "git am" to apply a patch sent using "git send-email". This
> patch does not apply properly. I try to use "git am --show-current-patch"
> to understand the problem. However, since original mail is encoded in quoted-
> printable, data returned by --show-current-patch is not a valid patch.

I agree that --show-current-patch is a misdesigned feature.  We'd be
doing a better service to our users if we documented that the patch
and log message are found at .git/rebase-apply/{patch,msg} instead
of trying to hide the path.

Unfortunately, it is likely that those who added that feature have
built their tooling around it to depend on its output being the full
e-mail message "am" was fed (and split by "git mailsplit").  So I do
not think we will be changing the output to the patch file only.

But even then, the documentation can be fixed without any backward
compatibility issues.  Perhaps like this?

 Documentation/git-am.txt | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/git-am.txt b/Documentation/git-am.txt
index 6f6c34b0f4..f63b70325c 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-am.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-am.txt
@@ -172,7 +172,7 @@ default.   You can use `--no-utf8` to override this.
 	untouched.
 
 --show-current-patch::
-	Show the patch being applied when "git am" is stopped because
+	Show the entire e-mail message "git am" has stopped at, because
 	of conflicts.
 
 DISCUSSION