I beg to differ.
When I copy/paste text, my mail compser feels it has the right (and for a good reason) to do stuff to the text. This may include changing tabs with spaces, word wraps, etc. These are exteremely annoying.
On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, when I attach a text document, at least when I later view the message, the document is displayed inline (as opposed to actually being inline, which it isn't).
Dimitrie - please find one of my patch submissions, and let me know if it is displayed inline for you. If it is, attaching a file called .diff is the right way to go. If not, attaching .txt may be a solution. I am very much against copying the patch into the message, however.
Shachar
Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Hi all,
There is something concerning submitting patches that bothers me to no end: inlining vs. attaching them.
I don't know about others, but for me 99/1 rule applies: I at least skim over 99% of the patches inlines in the message, whereas I bother to read at most 1% of the ones attached/tar.gzed/ziped. Maybe I'm an extreme case, but there's got to be more to it than my personal quirks.
If a patch is sent to wine-patches, it's sent there for peer review. If you don't want the review, send it to Alexandre directly, even though I suggest this is avoided as much as possible. However, it you do send it to wine-patches, please, *please* inline it!
What about a nice patch submission policy: -- unified diff only (required) -- have a decent subject (recommended) -- a long description (optional, if the change warrants it) -- a meaningful ChangeLog entry (required) -- new files, if any, included in patch, diffed against /dev/null (required) -- patch inlined at the end of the message (required) -- one changeset per message
Most of these things are already followed by most people, with the exception of the inlining bit. Alexandre, what about you reject patches that aren't in this format with a pointer to these rules? All this is a matter of habit, and I think we'll all benefit if these rules are followed.