Re: Supporting git-send-email/hg email in VC

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Antoine Kalmbach [2022-08-24 14:56:00] wrote:
> Would it make sense for Emacs' VC to support emailing patches from
> within Emacs?

Yes!

> The right thing would be in vc-dir-mode to prompt for a ref (branch, -1,
> HEAD^, etc),

I think in the general case it needs to revisions to delimit the
sequence of patches.  And since it's VC it'd need to take into account
the various ways backends can specify such a pair of revisions, but the
simplest option is really to receive the two revisions separately.

> in vc-log-mode it would be to compose a set of patches from the marked
> commit(s), or prompt like in vc-dir-mode for a ref to send a patch
> from a user-specified ref.

It might also make sense to allow it from a diff-mode buffer
(in which case VC would not be involved).

>> Warning! Some people think that they can get away with sending patches
>> through some means other than git send-email, but you can't. Your
>> patches will be broken and a nuisance to the maintainers whose inbox
>> they land in. Follow the golden rule: just use git send-email.
> But I find that if and only if you use git-format-patch, the end result
> is pretty much the same.

I'm not sure what problems they're thinking of, so maybe the "pretty
much" is a problem.

> If people think this would be a useful feature, I can open a bug report
> to track this and start working on it. The proposed reference
> implementation for Git would be to (1) ask the user for a ref (2) call
> git format-patch with that (3) compose a new message in Emacs, and set
> the body of the message to be the output of git-format-patch (OR attach
> the file) and (4) let the MUA take it from there.

Sounds good to me.


        Stefan