[RFC] Store patch authors in the new Patch.author field

[Peter Maydell]

On 28 April 2011 21:36, Guilherme Salgado <guilherme.salgado at linaro.org> wrote:
> When the first line of the email message that contains a patch starts with
> 'From:' and contain an email address, we use that address as the author;
> otherwise we use the same as the submitter.

What I think we should be doing here is to accept the same patch email
format as 'git am' [or more precisely, 'git mailinfo'], which this
patch doesn't quite do. From the 'git am' manpage:

# "From: " and "Subject: " lines starting the body override the
# respective commit author name and title values taken from the headers.

In particular, if a patch mail body starts with:

  Subject: the real subject
  From: Some Joker <peter.maydell at linaro.org>

  The real long description

then git am will honour the From: in the body but this patch
will not (because the From is the second body line, not the first).

[git mailinfo also allows Date, Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding
headers in the body, but I don't think we need to support that since
it's undocumented.]

-- PMM