git-send-email (was: Why are so many great packages not trying to get included in GNU Emacs?)

[Kévin Le Gouguec]

Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> writes:

> On Jun 13 2020, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
>> mail message was not formatted with git-format-patch.
>
> Yes, it was.

In case that clears up some confusion:

As Konstantin said, the patch[1] was sent with git send-email, which
allows the sender to "annotate" the patch with some text that will be
ignored by git am (IIUC merely by virtue of being stuck between "---\n"
and the actual diff).

In Gnus, piping the whole mail to "cd path/to/emacs && git am" (hitting
"|" in the summary buffer) mostly does TRT: the patch is applied, with
the email's subject as commit summary, and the rest of the message (up
to "---\n") completing the commit message.

The only issue, AFAICT, is that git am fails to strip away the [PATCH]
prefix; IUUC this is because it does not expect debbugs's own "bug#NNN"
prefix.


Feel free to dismiss this as armchair commentary, but I think that we're
likely to see more and more patches sent with git send-email[2], since
it is heavily promoted by other projects privileging mail-based
workflows[3].


[1] <20200603115103.69611-1-Hi-Angel@yandex.ru>
    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2020-06/msg00128.html

[2] See e.g. Jonas's patch series back in May:
    <87sgg26zpv.fsf@bernoul.li>
    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2020-05/msg00853.html

[3] Sourcehut developers, in particular, have spent a fair amount of
    virtual ink describing how to use it:

    https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html    
    https://man.sr.ht/git.sr.ht/send-email.md

    They have even set up a dummy repository for would-be contributors
    to try it out:

    https://git-send-email.io/
    https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/email-test-drive/