Re: Supporting git-send-email/hg email in VC

[Akib Azmain Turja]

Antoine Kalmbach <ane@iki.fi> writes:

> Would it make sense for Emacs' VC to support emailing patches from
> within Emacs? It kind of doesn't make sense that I can do mostly
> everything in VC... but I have to jump to the command line (shell) to
> use git-send-email.
>
> I was thinking there could be a command called 'vc-mail-commit' which
> would in vc-dir-mode or vc-log-mode do the right thing and call git
> format-patch and then compose a mail with the contents of the patch (or
> the patch attached, depending on customization).
>
> The right thing would be in vc-dir-mode to prompt for a ref (branch, -1,
> HEAD^, etc), in vc-log-mode it would be to compose a set of patches from
> the marked commit(s), or prompt like in vc-dir-mode for a ref to send a
> patch from a user-specified ref.
>
> Does such a feature make sense? I know sites like git-send-email.io[1]
> say things like:
>
>> Warning! Some people think that they can get away with sending patches
>> through some means other than git send-email, but you can't. Your
>> patches will be broken and a nuisance to the maintainers whose inbox
>> they land in. Follow the golden rule: just use git send-email.
>
> But I find that if and only if you use git-format-patch, the end result
> is pretty much the same. To that end, I think if Emacs managed to
> integrate with the different DVCS' email-based workflows, it would be
> a great usability improvement.
>
> If people think this would be a useful feature, I can open a bug report
> to track this and start working on it. The proposed reference
> implementation for Git would be to (1) ask the user for a ref (2) call
> git format-patch with that (3) compose a new message in Emacs, and set
> the body of the message to be the output of git-format-patch (OR attach
> the file) and (4) let the MUA take it from there.
>
> Alternatively, it would be possible to use a combination of with-editor
> + git-send-email, but only if we should need ot abide by the "rule",
> because to me there aren't many nuances beyond using the format
> specified by git-format-patch with your own MUA vs. using
> git-send-email. Or do I not know enough about the latter to not see the
> missing pieces?
>
> [1] https://git-send-email.io/#step-3

I want this feature.  Even better if I can integrate this with Gnus.

-- 
Akib Azmain Turja

Find me on Mastodon at @akib@hostux.social.

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