Re: [Quilt-dev] quilt mail bugs (was [patch 1/8])

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hallo Andreas!

Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 September 2005 14:15, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>>
>>- 'quilt mail --mbox file' ignores FILE and outputs on stdout.
> 
> 
> Strange, I know I've had this working before. Fixed.
> 
>>- `quilt mail --subject ...' is not copied into the template Subject:
>>    header and is lost (note the missing subject in my series posts --
>>    I thought --subject would override Subject: so didn't fill it in
>>    again after specifying it already)
> 
> Indeed, yes. Fixed as well.

Cool, thanks!

>>-  `hostname -f' doesn't work except on Linux  (see my patch 6/8)
>>-  no way to send from a NAT smarthost (see my patch 6/8)
> 
> I'll give those some more thought. Compared to what pain it was to implement 
> the mail command, this is really minor ;)

Indeed! :-)

> I don't really like using any MTA options if avoidable; they might not be 
> supported.

Maybe an option to the mail command to pass through the needed option?

>>Actually, I'm not sure that the ENVELOPE_SENDER is a good thing to
>>have.  Much nicer for quilt mail to extract it from my --from argument
>>to avoid spoofing.
> 
> What does your MUA do in its default configuration?

I don't know about Thunderbird (my normal MUA), but mutt uses the
equivalent to:

  sendmail -f address@hidden -F 'My Name' address@hidden address@hidden <<-EOF
  User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  From: "My Name" <address@hidden>
  ...
  EOF

> Does your ``hostname'' 
> have a -d option?

Nope, neither Apple's or GNU's.

>>Additionally, it would be nice if there was of not posting the entire
>>series... say I update one of my patches based on feedback and want to
>>repost it without all the others using:
>>
>>   $ quilt mail --send --from '"Gary V. Vaughan <address@hidden>"' \
>>        -p patches/fix-foo.diff
> 
> 
> I agree this would be nice. Simply generating a new "[patch n/#] foo" message 
> isn't right though: You really want a "Re: ..." including References and 
> In-reply-to headers ... and the mail command doesn't know those. Any ideas?

It's not perfect, but mail could keep the Message-IDs for the most
recently sent message regarding a given patch, and Reply-To that for
subsequent messages...

While I'm thinking about this: should I be keeping several series files
each with patches in some logical grouping?  Is there any tool support
for that if so?  I've ended up with one long series file per project,
and after my first use of quilt mail (which posts the whole series),
I can't use it again to post new patches I've since added to the
series.  Maybe 'quilt series' should enumerate the patches, and mail
could accept ranges to post ala 'quilt mail ... -p7,12-15,17,21- ??

>>Maybe even to default the subject line to `fix-foo.diff' if --subject
>>is omitted.
> 
> Good idea, yes. I'm using the tricks documented in README.MAIL for setting 
> the 
> subjects from the patch header. Andrew Morton did complain that the default 
> behavior was weak. I should really hack up something better.

Yes please!

>>There are a couple of other features I'd like to have from my mailnotify
>>script (used in libtool, m4, tla-utils and others, attached): gpg
>>signing and mime attached patches as an alternative to verbatim mail
>>body inserted patches.
> 
> Can gpg sign every mail in an mbox? Signing might be relatively easy to add, 
> except you don't want to type your passphrase once for each patch.

Not directly.  But gpg --multifile will sign several files, asking for
the signature only once.  A bit more work is needed to sign the right
bits of each mail before creating the mbox file or sending each message.

> Do you mean multiple mime-attached patches in a single message? Otherwise, 
> what would be the benefit of mime-attaching the patch to an empty message 
> body vs. making the patch the message body?

Mailnotify used to only put patches in the message body, but I kept
receiving complaints that peoples MUAs would wrap the patch lines
before saving the mail, and that patch would choke on the result.
Putting the header in the body (actually as a text/plain section),
and the patch as a text/x-patch section for each message avoids this.

Having said that, if quilt mail could attach the series as mime
parts, that would be really cool!

> How does your MUA render the mails ``quilt mail'' produces? It should show 
> them inline (but doesn't have to), and it should offer to safe them to a 
> file.

Both Thunderbird and Mail.app show the entire message as a single item,
which I can save with mail headers and all (patch ignores those though
obviously).

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan      ())_.  address@hidden,gnu.org}
Research Scientist   ( '/   http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker           / )=   http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author   `(_~)_   http://sources.redhat.com/autobook

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