Using the From: address specified in the body

[Peter Maydell]

On 17 March 2011 23:06, Guilherme Salgado <guilherme.salgado at linaro.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-03-16 at 13:50 -0300, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
>> Em 16-03-2011 11:03, Guilherme Salgado escreveu:
>> > I see that some emails with patches have a From: field in the body[1],
>> > and I'm wondering if there's any reason for not using that (when
>> > available, of course) as the patch submitter.  Well, now that I think of
>> > it, one could argue that the submitter is whoever sent the email, but
>> > maybe it would be useful to have a 'author' field on Patch so that we
>> > can properly represent cases where submitter != author?

>> For example, I've seem a few patches that have email references. It would
>> not be impossible to see a "From: " or "Author: " in the middle of such
>> references.
>
> That's a good point, but I think we could avoid that if we were
> conservative and just used a 'From:' when it's at the beginning of a
> line and that line is before the beginning of the diff.

Presumably what you actually want to do is accept From: lines in the
body in exactly the cases where 'git am' accepts them, since that's
the patch-email syntax where this case actually apperas in practice...
git am is more restrictive than just "at beginning of the line and
before the diff".

Here's an example where the From: in the body and the email
From: don't match (not even the same person), because the patch was
written by Christophe but (re)transmitted to the list by me as part
of a larger patchset:
http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/83254/

Guilherme: presumably Linaro will want to make a distinction
between "Linaro wrote this" and "a Linaro person is doing
upstream submaintainer type work with othre peoples' contributions"
in our patch counting metrics? (if so, there's your test case :-))

For completeness, should we support the git am "Subject: can
be at the start of the body" syntax too?

-- PMM