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From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@istop.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Subject: Re: Kernel SCM saga..
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 14:36:11 -0400
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On Thursday 07 April 2005 13:38, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 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.

Well, my list in the parent post _was_ sorted by subject.  But that is a 
quibble, the important point is that you just officially defined the 
canonical format, which everybody should stick to for now:

> That canonical format is:
>
>  Subject: [PATCH 001/123] [<area>:] <explanation>
>
> together with the first line of the body being a
>
>  From: Original Author <origa@email.com>
>
> 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.

Regards,

Daniel
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