Re: [Quilt-dev] problems with quilt mail

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

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.

>  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.

>   - 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.

>   - 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.

>   - 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 ...

> The last 3 aren't that important, but just things that would make my
> life easier, as someone who uses 'quilt mail' about 2-6 times a week.

Thanks,
Andreas