Betr: Re: contribution process, patches by e-mail in particular

[Alban Hertroys]

mercurial-bounces at selenic.com wrote on 03/07/2014 00:53:26:

> > I'd really like to chase down /what/ about patches-by-email is 
> perceived to be awful. Right now I'm only hearing that y'all hate 
> it, but not WHY.
> 
> I don't find it awful, but I don't find it great either, so perhaps I
> can comment on why I don't find it great (both as a contributor and as
> a reviewer (the latter mostly on the TortoiseHg project)).
> 
> In short, I use gmail, and gmail sucks when used as a patches-by-email
> tool (it is otherwise a pretty great web based email tool, and that is
> why I use it in the first place). How does gmail suck?
> 
> - It sucks for keeping track of patch series, specially for resends
> and new versions of series. Its threading code gets confused all the
> time when you resend a new version of a series. Worse, it does not
> always get confused in the same way. In particular, sometimes it will
> group some of the emails within a series resend with their previous
> versions but then it will not group the rest of the emails.
> - It sucks for getting patches _into_ a local mercurial clone. I don't
> know how you guys do it, but I manually select "show original" on
> every email in the series, copy the patch part and then import it
> using TortoiseHg's import from clipboard feature. This is incredibly
> time consuming for large patch series (to the point that I rarely
> check those out).
> - It sucks for keeping track of which patches were reviewed and 
> which have not.

Just a thought, but...

GMail supports IMAP. To me, it seems possible to create a tool that 
subscribes to a specific (set of) IMAP folders to make patches and series 
of patches available to hg. Then, all you need to do in ie. GMail is to 
move those messages to such an IMAP folder (or tag it appropriately in 
GMail-speak) and the tool would have access to them.

Would that solve the problem, or perhaps even make email a preferable tool 
for patches?



alban.hertroys at apollovredestein.com
T: 




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