Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262522AbVDGRgY (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Apr 2005 13:36:24 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262532AbVDGRgY (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Apr 2005 13:36:24 -0400 Received: from fire.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:24029 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262522AbVDGRgM (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Apr 2005 13:36:12 -0400 Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 10:38:06 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Daniel Phillips cc: Paul Mackerras , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Kernel SCM saga.. In-Reply-To: <200504071300.51907.phillips@istop.com> Message-ID: References: <16980.55403.190197.751840@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com> <200504071300.51907.phillips@istop.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2345 Lines: 57 On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Daniel Phillips wrote: > > In that case, a nice refinement is to put the sequence number at the end of > the subject line so patch sequences don't interleave: No. That makes it unsortable, and also much harder to pick put which part of the subject line is the explanation, and which part is just metadata for me. So my prefernce is _overwhelmingly_ for the format that Andrew uses (which is partly explained by the fact that I am used to it, but also by the fact that I've asked for Andrew to make trivial changes to match my usage). That canonical format is: Subject: [PATCH 001/123] [:] together with the first line of the body being a From: Original Author followed by an empty line and then the body of the explanation. After the body of the explanation comes the "Signed-off-by:" lines, and then a simple "---" line, and below that comes the diffstat of the patch and then the patch itself. That's the "canonical email format", and it's that because my normal scripts (in BK/tools, but now I'm working on making them more generic) take input that way. It's very easy to sort the emails alphabetically by subject line - pretty much any email reader will support that - since because the sequence number is zero-padded, the numerical and alphabetic sort is the same. If you send several sequences, you either send a simple explaining email before the second sequence (hey, it's not like I'm a machine - I can use my brains too, and in particular if the final number of patches in each sequence is different, even if the sequences got re-ordered and are overlapping, I can still just extract one from the other by selecting for "/123] " in the subject line), or you modify the Subject: line subtly to still sort uniquely and alphabetically in-order, ie the subject lines for the second series might be Subject: [PATCHv2 001/207] x86: fix eflags tracking ... All very unambiguous, and my scripts already remove everything inside the brackets and will just replace it with "[PATCH]" in the final version. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/