Re: [git patches] libata updates, GPG signed (but see admin notes)

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> You keep saying cut-and-paste, but do you mind feeding the e-mail text
> itself to a tool, instead of cut-and-paste?

Feeding the email to a tool is actually a fair amount of extra work.
It would have worked well in the days when I used text-based email
clients that just had a "pipe email to command" model, but that's long
gone.

In contrast, cut-and-paste to another program is easy - but then you
really can't depend on whitespace or headers or other subtle things.

> A respond-to-request-pull wrapper you would use could be:
>
>  - Get the e-mail from the standard input;
>  - Pick up the signed bits and validate the signature;
>  - Perform the requested fetch; and
>  - Record the merge (or prepare .git/MERGE_MSG) with both the signed bits.

So is there any reason this couldn't be cut-and-paste? Make the signed
part small (*not* including diffstat and shortlog), and make it
whitespace-safe, and I wouldn't mind a tool at all.

If it *can* take the whole email, that would probably be a good design
(so that a "pipe email to command"  model would still work), but it
would be much better if it doesn't require it.

> and the "signed bits" could include:
>
>   - the repository and the branch you were expected to pull;
>   - the topic description.
>
> among other things the requestor can edit when request-pull message is
> prepared.

One thing I'd like is that it would also fire up an editor for the
merge, even if it gets the topic description from the email or
cut-and-paste. I often want to fix up peoples grammar etc. That's a
separate argument for trying to keep the signed part minimal - because
 I really don't want to have to maintain spelin errors just because
they are part of what was signed..

                  Linus
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