Your git mailing configuration / how can I improve mine?

[David Disseldorp]

Hi Andrew,

On Tue, 03 Jun 2014 21:05:33 +1200, Andrew Bartlett wrote:

> I've been trying to improve the profile and accessibility of my patches,
> in the hope that I might be able to improve the attention I get to the
> simpler of my changes, and make it easier for folks to indicate what
> changes might need more explanation?
> 
> Is there anything you can suggest that would make it easier to do that?
> I know obnox found it frustrating having my patches munged by mbox
> storage (>From), and so I've started to play with git-send-email, and
> I'll try git imap-send tomorrow. 
> 
> I do like the way your recent patches have been sent to the list.  What
> configuration do you use to get the mail and git tree based patches all
> lined up so well?  (I really like being able to read the patches as
> mails, and then just fetch them with git to autobuild them)

I use the default git send-email settings.
For patch-sets with a common topic, I normally do the following:

1. Push my branch to my repository on git.samba.org, using a branch name
   that matches the topic.
2. Generate a pull request, which includes the diffstat and git URL:
	# git request-pull <start> <url/remote>
3. Prepare to send the patch set using git send-email, with a
   introductory mail:
	# git send-email --compose -<number_of_commits_from_HEAD>
4. Copy the pull-request from (2) into the introductory mail, add a
   brief description of the patch-set.
5. Send away!

Reviewers then have the option of reviewing the patches in their mail
client, or pulling down the series via the URL provided.

If changes are requested following review, then I find it best to
squash them into the existing patch set (via git rebase -i), and then
send the full series again (back to step 1, pass go and collect $200),
with a version number added to the subsequent branch name and mail
thread (via git send-email --compose --subject-prefix="PATCH v#").

I've documented this latter step at:
http://blog.elastocloud.org/2013/12/git-send-email-patch-version-subject.html

Cheers, David