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I think it's worth adding, in the age of git sending patches by email is easier then ever - it definitely shows that git was developed by Linus with the kernel'
by DSMan195276 10y ago
I think it's worth adding, in the age of git sending patches by email is easier then ever - it definitely shows that git was developed by Linus with the kernel's development in mind. There is literally a `git format-patch` command which spits out a full formatted email (or emails) of your various commits, which can then be sent to a mail client to be edited and sent out. Or even easier, just use git to send the patches as email direct via `git send-email`.
The harder part is touched on in the article - email clients and email servers. All the patches sent to the mailing-list are plain text, and lots of clients or servers either mess with the plain text before sending or after receiving. And with that they also take some configuring to avoid sending attachments as base64 - which will be rejected by the kernel. Gmail thankfully doesn't mess anything up on the sever side, but the web client wraps your email to 80 characters per line making it unusable. Because of the above issues, using a separate mail client is essentially required, and setting them up can be annoying and there aren't really tons of them to choose from. I personally use `mutt`, but I can definitely understand why some wouldn't want to bother.
- bluedino 10y agoOutlook loves messing with messages. "Detecting and removing" extra line breaks is one of its features
- digi_owl 10y agoAh, MS And their hatred of line breaks...
- DSMan195276 10y agoI remember reading that when Microsoft started contributing some code to the Linux kernel (to support Hyper-V mostly) they had to run their own Linux server in house so they could send properly formatted emails for their patches, since they had no way to send email that wouldn't be messed-up by their Outlook servers.
- qb45 10y agoNot sure. I have successfully submitted patches to Linux using Outlook and Exchange. All it took was going through configuration and disabling some features which intuitively looked like they may mangle my emails.
- mrweasel 10y agoOutlook it probably the worst email client currently on the market and has been for the all of it's existence. It is my belief of the issue at lot of people have with email stems from Outlook. One example is the weird instance of top posting has made it hard to read many conversations and fostered a mentality of firing of quick response, reducing Outlook/email to a poor mans IM client. There's a ton of improvements that could be made to Outlook to make it better.
- molteanu 10y agoNope, Lotus Notes takes that prize.
- mrweasel 10y agoI forgot about Notes. Yes, Notes is worse.
- rjsw 10y agoI get a fair bit of top posted mail that has been sent from Apple Mail. Another thing that Apple Mail does is to pick Unicode characters that don't map to ascii for quote and other punctuation characters.
- colejohnson66 10y agoYou mean rich text quotes?
- rjsw 10y agoApple Mail sends text as UTF-8. If you view it in an ascii-only mail client you will see plenty of places where an ascii character could have been used but instead a visually similar code point has been chosen. Things like dashes, single and double quote characters.
- Bahamut 10y agoIf you use github, you can also utilize git am to pull changes locally - i.e. add .patch to the end of a pull request url, navigate to the resulting url, copy the new url, then run curl <insert url> | git am -3
- Manishearth 10y agoOr `git fetch origin pull/number/head:somebranchname` (omitting the branch will put it in FETCH_HEAD). I have a git alias for this, super useful.
- raverbashing 10y agoAlso, some kernel developers don't want to open a graphic terminal while they're doing their job