On 08/24/2016 02:49 PM, Eric Wong wrote: >> On Tue, 23 Aug 2016, Arif Khokar wrote:
>>> Given that public-inbox provides an NNTP interface, couldn't the ARTICLE >>> <message-id> NNTP command be used to easily retrieve the messages in a >>> given patch series (at least compared to POP or IMAP). Perhaps >>> git-send-email could be modified to include the message-id value of each >>> patch in the series that it sends to the mailing list and include it in >>> the cover letter. > > I think that makes sense; perhaps an X-Git-Followups: header > from send-email which lists the child Message-IDs the same way > References: does for ancestors. That sounds like a better idea compared to what I came up with originally and it would be much easier to parse out of the downloaded cover letter message headers as opposed to looking for delimiters/keywords in the message body. > (perhaps there's already a standardized header for listing children) I don't recall ever seeing anything like that in any RFC or message header I've read through. It's an interesting idea though. > I thought about allowing a giant MIME message with all the > patches attached, too but that won't work for a large patch > series due to size limits along various SMTP hops. I think the vast majority of SMTP servers allow several megabyte messages though their configured policy. I can't speak for those who use their own SMTP servers though. NNTP servers may limit an individual message to a megabyte or less though. > Compression might make spam filters unhappy, too. Perhaps, but there should be more reliance on IP blacklists and DMARC as a first line of defense against SPAM. >>> Then a script could be written (i.e., git-download-patch) which could >>> parse the cover letter message (specified using its message-id), and >>> download all the patches in series, which can then be applied using >>> git-am. This would in fact take the email client out of the equation in >>> terms of saving patches. > > w3m -dump -dump_source nntp://<NNTP-server>/<Message-ID> > > ought to already work for news.gmane.org and news.public-inbox.org That's interesting. I didn't know w3m was capable of that. But, given the way you specified it, it doesn't show the article headers. Replacing the -dump and -dump_source options with -dump_both would display the headers as well. > The Net::NNTP Perl module is a standard part of the Perl distro > for many years, now (along with Net::SMTP), so that would not > be a roadblock for implementing a custom downloader distributed > with git. I wrote a prototype one and included it in my response to Johannes in <dm5pr17mb1353b99ebd5f4fd23360dd41d3...@dm5pr17mb1353.namprd17.prod.outlook.com>. It could be used as a starting point in terms of making it easier to download patches to apply with git-am (without having to rely on one's MUA or the tooling around it).
