Re: Working with public-inbox.org [Was: [PATCH] rev-parse: respect core.hooksPath in --git-path]

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Philip,

On Mon, 22 Aug 2016, Philip Oakley wrote:

> From: "Duy Nguyen" <pclouds@gmail.com>
> > On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 8:06 PM, Johannes Schindelin
> > <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> > > My point stands. We are way more uninviting to contributors than
> > > necessary. And a huge part of the problem is that we require contributors
> > > to send their patches inlined into whitespace-preserving mails.
> >
> > We probably can settle this in the next git survey with a new
> > question: what's stopping you from contributing to git?
> > -- 
> One has to be careful that some of this is preaching to the choir.

Exactly.

> I do note that dscho's patches now have the extra footer (below the three
> dashes) e.g.
> 
> Published-As: https://github.com/dscho/git/releases/tag/cat-file-filters-v1
> Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/dscho/git cat-file-filters-v1
> 
> If say I used that, and sent my patch series via Outlook Express (<sigh>),
> with it's white space damage, would those footers help once the content has
> been reviewed (rather than white spacing style) in the applying the patch?

I considered recommending this as some way to improve the review process.
The problem, of course, is that it is very easy to craft an email with an
innocuous patch and then push some malicious patch to the linked
repository.

Now, with somebody like me who would lose a lot when destroying trust, it
is highly unlikely. But it is possible that in between the hundreds of
sincere contributors a bad apple tries to sneak in bad stuff.

Therefore, if we were to support a Git-driven contribution process that
*also* sends mail, that mail needs to be generated by a trusted source, to
ensure that the content of the mail is identical to the original Git
commits.

Ciao,
Dscho