[Quilt-dev] problems with quilt mail

[Greg KH]

Hi all,

Somedays I feel that I'm the only one that uses 'quilt mail', as it
likes to thwart me all the time...

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.

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



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.
  - 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.
  - 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.
  - allow me to specify a 'Subject-Prefix' of my own, as I'm tired of
    editing it by hand.
  - 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.
  - allow the macros used in 'Subject-Prefix' and 'Subject' to be valid
    within the body of the 00 email itself.

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 for getting this far with my complaints...

greg k-h