Subject: Re: [PATCH] format-patch: add arbitrary email headers

From: Michael Hendricks <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:42:12 -0600

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:11:02PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Michael Hendricks <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > format-patch supports the format.headers configuration for adding
> > arbitrary email headers to the patches it outputs.  This patch adds
> > support for a --header argument which makes the same feature available
> > from the command line.  This is useful when the content of custom
> > email headers must change from branch to branch.
> 
> How should this interact with the configuration variable?
> 
> Typically we allow command line options to override the matching config
> variable, so that people can say "here are the settings I ordinarily use"
> in the config file, and say "but I do not want the usual values to take
> effect for this particular invocation; please use these _instead_" with
> command line options.
> 
> Note that the above question is "how should this interact"; not "how does
> this interact".  I can see you chose to make this cumulative in your patch
> and the documentaiton.
> 
> I am asking if that is what the users want, overriding is preferred, or
> perhaps another option to clear extra headers (say, "--no-extra-headers")
> is necessary to allow both.

In all the cases where I use custom headers on patch emails, I want
the command line headers to be cumulative with the config headers.  I
only configure headers which are constant (such as "X-Project:
project-name").  The ones that vary have no reasonable default value
since they typically represent a bug tracking number or something
similar.

Perhaps --add-header is a better name for this argument.  That name at
least makes it clear that headers specified on the command line are
cumulative.  If someone has a use case for --no-extra-headers, they
can add it later and --add-header retains the same meaning.

Follow-up patch coming shortly.

-- 
Michael