Pain points in Git's patch flow

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 02:04:32AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> In general, I have trouble keeping track of the patch mails I've sent.
> I do definitely need to refer to them later, but I don't generally keep
> them around on my system since they tend to duplicate my repository, so
> I end up needing to find them in my mailbox, which as mentioned, is
> slow and error prone.

A quick and easy feature request to this (which I have had as well)
would be implementing a sendmail.fcc config, which if set, would
append any mail messages sent by git send-email to the Unix
mbox file specified by sendmail.fcc.

Once you have the message id of any patch mail that you've sent...

> I have trouble finding all the spots where people have given me review
> feedback.  I have patch mails and responses to those mails go to a
> particular folder, but I still often find that I'm not quite sure if
> I've gotten every piece of feedback in a review.  Sometimes,
> embarrassingly, I don't, and then I have to send another reroll.
> Regardless, this makes rerolling a series much slower as I have to comb
> my mail multiple times.

This becomes pretty easy to solve using existing tooling.  For people
who like web interfaces:

    https://lore.kernel.org/r/<message-id>

(This works today because git at vger.kernel.org is archived by the
lore.kernel.org public-inbox archive.)

Or for those who like CLI's and/or text-based mail readers such as
mutt or pine:

   b4 mbox -o /tmp <message-id>

This will dump the full mail thread (given any any message-id in that
mail thread) to /tmp/<messaige-id>.mbx in Unix mbox format, again
relying on lore.kernel.org.  I've found this to be especially handy if
I've been cc'ed part-way through a mail thread, or if I was only cc'ed
on a single patch and I want to see the full patch series for context.

Cheers,

						- Ted