Re: Workflow with mu4e + magit for sending patchsets to guix?

[Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>]

zimoun writes:

> Hi Chris
>
> +CC Kyle since they probably knows the status [1].

Sorry, I have no good news for you :/

> On Mon, 16 Nov 2020 at 15:28, Christopher Lemmer Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
>
>> I've been making patchset series of emails to guix-patches manually.
>> I'm sure this is the wrong thing to do.  I use mu4e + magit and know
>> others have a similar setup.
>>
>> What do you all do?
>
> I am sending really few patches so my workflow is probably not
> optimized.  What I do is from magit-status:
>
>  1. Select the commits

I'd suggest always setting an upstream for topic branches.  Then the
range you're interested in is almost always "@{upstream}.." (which can
be shortened to "@{u}..").  Or you can add something like this to
Magit's popup [1]:

  ;; https://git.kyleam.com/emacs.d/tree/lisp/km-magit.el?id=928629a9ccd8b439d0e98d9976b75c4cf5f048f9#n836

  (defun km/magit-patch-create-from-upstream (&optional args)
    (interactive (list (transient-args 'magit-patch-create)))
    (if-let ((upstream (magit-get-upstream-branch)))
        (apply #'magit-run-git "format-patch" upstream args)
      (user-error "No upstream branch")))

  (transient-append-suffix 'magit-patch-create "c"
    '("u" "@{upstream}.." km/magit-patch-create-from-upstream))

Most of my magit customizations never find their way upstream (they tend
to be very tailored to me), but something like the command above would
probably be good to add.

>  2. W c
>     C-m b origin/master RET

Yay, base commit :)  Note that with the upstream set, you can select
"auto" here.  Or you can configure format.useAutoBase to "whenAble" and
not bother setting the option for each invocation.

>     C-m l

If you follow the convention of writing a cover letter only for
multi-patch series, you can drop the 'C-m l' because by default git will
generate a cover letter when there is more than one commit.

>     c
>  3. Edit the cover letter
>  4. !! send-email --to=guix-patches@gnu.org 0000-cover-letter.patch
>  5. Wait and refresh my inbox
>  6. !! send-email --to=12345@gnu.org 000?-*.patch

Yeah, 4-6 are tricky and debbugs-specific.  For other projects, it could
just be 'send-email *.patch' once sendemail.to is configured to point to
the list's address.

For 6, using '--no-thread --in-reply-to=...' will retain the same
threading you'd see if you weren't using debbugs (i.e didn't have to do
the two-step send).

Also, not helpful for mu4e users, but since I know simon uses notmuch...
notmuch has a really handy notmuch-show-stash-git-send-email.  I have a
variant for step 5 above.  If you call it visiting the acknowledgment
message, it will copy

  --to="NNNNN@debbugs.gnu.org"  --in-reply-to="message-id"

to your kill ring.

  https://git.kyleam.com/emacs.d/tree/lisp/km-mail.el?id=928629a9ccd8b439d0e98d9976b75c4cf5f048f9#n225

> AFAIK, there is no ’send-email’ support with Magit.  [...]
>
> What I have understood is that Magit-forge should implement ’send-email’
> as a backend (forge) but it has not happened yet.  Or I missed the
> news. :-)

Right, there's no send-email support in Magit (or any of the extensions
under its organization).  I of course can't speak for Jonas, but I'm not
aware of any movement or concrete plans on that front.  I think the most
recent thread to touch on this is actually the one you opened early this
year about extending format-patch options:
<https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/4028>.

And, sadly I guess, my view is still similar to what I said there:

  send-email has of course come up a number of times before (gh-1756 and
  gh-1800 are the most relevant, I think), and tackling that requires a
  vision that I don't really have.  Perhaps due to a lack of
  imagination, I can't think of an implementation on Magit's side that
  would improve the simple send-email command that I run.  In terms of
  sending mail, the most involved thing that I need to do is get the
  --to/--ccs and --in-reply-to from an existing thread, but in my view
  that's outside of Magit's scope.

I don't know.  Maybe I should try to think harder about it.

A final note of hope: as a lurker on the notmuch list, I've noticed that
Jonas has starting doing some patch-based contributions.  So, perhaps
he'll get an itch and do his amazing Jonas thing.