Re: [Quilt-dev] problems with quilt mail

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 10:42:59PM +0100, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> Greg,
> 
> I've pushed a few fixed to the fixes-0.51 branch: Jean has recently
> pushed a bash rewrite of the backup-files utility to the master branch;
> I'm not sure if there are any open issues and if performance is okay.
> (Any insights into that would be very welcome.)
> 
> If you want both master and fixes-0.51, the branches merge trivially.
> 
> On Sam, 2012-02-11 at 08:46 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > Somedays I feel that I'm the only one that uses 'quilt mail', as it
> > likes to thwart me all the time...
> 
> You sure are the heaviest user of 'quilt mail', with the biggest variety
> of patches.
> 
> > My constant problems involve patches with "incorrect" emails in them,
> > which quilt should just ignore.
> > 
> > This can be seen with any patch that has the following in the body:
> >     Signed-off-by: Joe Programmer <joe at somewhere dot com>
> > 
> > Yes, someone thought they would be smart and try to obfuscate their
> > email address, but quilt dies horribly on it.  At least it does warn me
> > that 'joe' is an invalid email, so I can dig through the patches to find
> > which one was wrong and fix it up by hand.
> >
> > But, my latest fun was with a patch that quilt mail was thinking had an
> > email address, yet it didn't, and it would complain with an error
> > message that caused me a few hours to track down.
> 
> Sorry about that.
> 
> > The patch in question is 025e4ab3db07fcbf62c01e4f30d1012234beb980 in the
> > Linux kernel tree.  Export it to patch form and import it to a quilt
> > tree and see the error:
> > 
> > $ cd linux/work/torvalds
> > $ git show --pretty=email 025e4ab3db07fcbf62c01e4f30d1012234beb980 > x.patch
> > $ cd linux/temp
> > $ quilt import ../work/torvalds/x.patch
> > $ quilt mail --mbox x
> > <type in a valid email address for the to: line and a subject and body>
> > Delivery address `' is invalid
> 
> The patch has an otherwise empty "to:" line which 'quilt mail' was
> handling wrong.  Should be fixed.

Ah, I missed that to: line in the body, that makes more sense.  Thanks
for fixing this.

> >  Some requests as a longtime user for 'quilt mail' would be:
> >   - Show me what patch had the problem in it!  It took me a long time of
> >     digging through 100 patches to determine that this one is the
> >     problem.  I used to have a local patch to quilt to list the patch
> >     names to the screen, just for this type of thing, but that's not
> >     really workable for everyone.
> 
> This should be fixed.
> 
> >   - Don't error out for stupid emails, just continue on, not adding a
> >     "broken" email to the message.  That would save me from having to
> >     edit the <foo at somewhere dot com> messages by hand, as people
> >     doing that obviously don't want me to be mailing them notifications.
> 
> I agree; hopefully you will only get warnings about that now.

Thanks for both of these.

> >   - maybe use the CPAN email parsing package instead of rolling your
> >     own?  I tried to make this change myself a long time ago, but I
> >     couldn't get it to work properly, someone with better perl skills
> >     than I would need to do it.
> 
> That might improve things a tiny bit -- the worst problems were actually
> in other parts of the code most of the time so far though.

Fair enough.

> >   - allow me to specify a 'Subject-Prefix' of my own, as I'm tired of
> >     editing it by hand.
> 
> So the --prefix=... option isn't enough?
> 
> >   - allow me to specify a whole header and body of the 00 message on the
> >     command line, or from a file, instead of dumping me into the editor.
> 
> The -m ... option allows to specify a message body and skips the editor.
> What do you want to achieve with specifying the entire header too?
> Replying to a previous email should work with the --reply-to ... option.

Doh, I never noticed all those command line options, that's what I get
for not reading the updated documentation, my appologies.  I think I can
script this better to almost not need any manual intervention for the
stable kernel releases, I'll work on that this week.

> >   - allow the macros used in 'Subject-Prefix' and 'Subject' to be valid
> >     within the body of the 00 email itself.
> 
> That shouldn't be so hard ...

For some reason I thought this used to work, but that might just have
been my imagination.  It's not a big deal, if I'm autogenerating the
body of the email, I can count how many patches are in the list ahead of
time and insert it "by hand" in the script, so it's not all that
important.

Thanks for the quick response and I'll try out the update later this
week when I do a new release.

greg k-h