[RFC] Patchsets in a single mail? [Re: [PATCH 01/55] Add simple subunit runner outputting subunit v1.]

[Stefan (metze) Metzmacher]

Am 13.02.2015 um 21:24 schrieb Michael Adam:
> Hi Jelmer,
> 
> apart from the fact that I am probably not the most
> suitable review for this patchset, some general
> comments, that actually don't even touch the actual
> patches yet:
> 
> I personally find the mode of sending one patch per
> mail instead of sending one patchset per mail somewhere
> between very difficult to cope with and unbearable,
> so that I generally try to stay away from bigger
> patchsets submitted like this for several reasons.
> 
> I want to elaborate on these reasons here not to address
> especially you but the whole team and community to
> get some feedback.
> 
> - You don't automatically get a introduction what the
>   overall patchset is all about (e.g. in your case.
>   what is its purpose?)
>   If you do it like I've seen David do, you get a
>   Patch 0/X mail with the initial explanation, that
>   fixes at least this thing.
> 
> - If people start replying to individual mails
>   and individual patches get updated, it quickly
>   gets almost impossible to know what the current
>   state of the patchset overall is.
> 
>   Also modifying one patch frequently requires
>   changing dependent patchest - where in the thread
>   do you post such updates?...
> 
> - How do I actually get the patches applied to my
>   git tree? I have to tag all relevant messages,
>   copy them into a new mbox file folder and use
>   that to do git am (for all I know).
> 
>   If I instead do "git format-patch --stdout" to
>   produce my patchset and attach that to a mail, it
>   just takes saving an attachment and applying it with
>   git am (provided I have set up encoding for
>   attachments correctly in my mail program ;-).
> 
> - Last but not least it complelety floods
>   the mailing list. Should we agree to require sending
>   one patch per mail, I would vote to create a separate
>   mailing list for patches. But imho it would be a bad
>   thing to separate the patches from the genenral
>   dev discussion.
> 
> So I would really really appreciate if people send
> patchsets in a single mail. There are (at least)
> two ways to do that:
> 
> 1) Do git format-patch HASH1^..HASH2
>    and attach all patch files produced to
>    a mail with a meaningful intro to the patchset.
> 
> 2) Do git format-patch --stdout HASH1^..HASH2 > my.patches
>    and attach my.patches to a mail with a meaningful
>    intro to the patchset.
> 
> Of these I greatly favour number 2, since for variant 1
> you again have the problem of saving and applying 55 single
> patch files, so let's forget about #1.
> 
> A viable variant of #1 could be to create a tar
> archive of the individual patch files and attach those.
> But the creation process is made more elaborate.
> 
> Summing up, I don't really see any advantage at alli
> of any solution over the approach of:
> 
>   a single mail with
>   a single attachment for
>   a single patchset
> 
> Maybe I am missing something.
> 
> I don't really want to force a decision at this point
> but request for comments, maybe I can understand what
> rides poeple to submit patchsets in a potentially
> mind-boggling number of mails. :-)

I also prefer a patchset as text attachment in a single mail.

Mail from git send-email never arrive in the correct order..

metze

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