Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/7] teach branch-specific options for format-patch

From: Denton Liu <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 10:19:42 -0400

Hi Junio,

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 05:56:00PM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Denton Liu <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> > Currently, format-patch only accepts branch.<name>.description as a
> > branch-specific configuration variable. However, there are many other
> > options which would be useful to have on a branch-by-branch basis,
> > namely cover letter subject and To: and Cc: headers.
> >
> > Teach format-patch to recognise these branch-specific configuration
> > options.
> >
> > Note that this patchset[1] was created using these new configuration
> > options:
> >
> > 	[branch "submitted/fix-revisions-txt"]
> > 		coverSubject = "cleanup revisions.txt"
> > 		cc = "Andreas Heiduk <[email-masked]>"
> > 		cc = "Duy Nguyen <[email-masked]>"
> > 		cc = "Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>"
>
> Do we have format.<something> configuration for these things?

Currently, we have format.{to,cc} but not format.coverSubject. The
reason why is that for the cover-subject, I didn't think that it would
make a lot of sense to have a general configuration for this since it
varies between branches, just like how branch.<name>.description does
not have a matching format.description.

>
> What I am trying to get at is if these are better structured similar
> to http options where http.<something> supplies the overall default
> for <something>, while http.<destination>.<something> gives a more
> destination site specific override of that default.  I.e. format.cc
> is used as fallback, while format.<branch>.cc is used to override.

The reason why I chose to use branch.<name>.* is because format-patch
currently reads from branch.<name>.description and I wanted to build on
top of that. In addition, I didn't want to scatter branch-specific
configs in two different place (i.e. have a branch.<branchName>.description
alongside a format.<branchName>.coverSubject).

>
> In any case, it smells to me that branch.<branch>.cc does not hint
> strongly enough that they are meant to affect format-patch.
>
>

Would you suggest moving to a format.<branchname>.* approach or would it
make sense to rename the configs to something like
branch.<name>.{emailCoverSubject,emailTo,emailCc}?

Thanks,

Denton