bug#15310: 24.3.50; [ELPA] Better commit notifications for upstream authors

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA>]

> The commits are all sent together (one notification email per push,
> AFAICS), as a plain-text email without attachments.

Indeed.  That's basically what Savannah's email notification gives us
(we can somewhat tweak it, the current config can be seen in
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/elpa.git/config, although we do not
have direct write access to it).

> Is there a better way to work with these emails?

"patch -p2" will strip off the "a/packages/" prefix.

> If no, it would be better if, for example, the script preparing these
> emails identified commits not synced from upstream (maybe by file paths
> inside the diffs?), fixed the paths, and attached these commits in patch
> format that's accepted by 'git am' and already contains the commit
> message and author information.

There's a copy of the script I use in elpa/admin/forward-diffs.py.
Improvements are welcome.

This said, I try to "push" the syncs separately from local changes, so
that an email should either contain a "sync" that you can completely
disregard, or only local changes.  This should be even more true once
I get a new cron job that does the syncs semi-automatically
(i.e. automatically when there's no conflict).  In that case you should
be able to pass the whole email to "patch -p2".


        Stefan