Re: let's not complain about harmless patch-apply failures

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 11:56:55AM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 4:04 AM, Kyotaro HORIGUCHI
> <horiguchi(dot)kyotaro(at)lab(dot)ntt(dot)co(dot)jp> wrote:
> > At Mon, 15 Jan 2018 21:45:34 -0500, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote in <26718(dot)1516070734(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
> >> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> >> > Since the "Stripping trailing CRs from patch" message is
> >> > totally harmless, I'm not sure why you should need to devote
> >> > any effort to avoiding it. Anyone who gets it should just
> >> > ignore it.
> >
> > I know that and totally agree to Robert but still I wonder why
> > (and am annoyed by) I sometimes receive such complain or even an
> > accusation that I sent an out-of-the-convention patch and I was
> > afraid that it is not actually common.
>
> I've seen that before as well.
>
> I have also noticed people complaining about patches that apply
> "with offsets", which also seems like needless nitpicking. If the
> offsets are large and the patch has been sitting around for a long
> time, there's a small chance it could be applying to the wrong
> place, but that is extremely rare. Most patches have small offsets,
> just a few lines, and there is no problem. Complaining about the
> offsets, on the other hand, is unhelpful: it not only forces the
> patch author to update the patch for no good reason, but it clutters
> the mailing list with useless traffic that everyone else has to
> ignore.
>
> I think we should have a firm policy that if patch -p1 can apply
> your patch, your patch is sufficiently well-formatted. If someone
> wants the result as a context diff, a unified diff, with one kind of
> line endings vs. another, or whatever, they can apply the patch
> locally and use whatever tools they like to get a diff in the format
> they prefer.
>
> When posting large patch stacks, 'git format-patch' is nice because
> it lets you give a sequence number and a commit message to each
> patch in a sensible way. I recommend it, but I don't think we
> should insist on it.

I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it helpful when patch sets come with
a single-sentence summary of the patch set and a commit message for
each individual patch.

Is git format-patch really too heavy a lift to ask of people?

Best,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778

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