Re: Externally feeding the drafts folder -- git format-patch integration

[lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Sat, 22 Feb 2014 10:20:42 +0100 Elias Oltmanns <eo@nebensachen.de> wrote: 
>
> ...
> EO> 2. Generate a patch series from the local commits with a command like
> EO>    $ git format-patch --thread --cover-letter --to developer@example.org \
> EO>    --cc devel@list.example.org --stdout > ~/Mail/git.spool
> EO> 3. Fire up gnus and have the patch series stored in ~/Mail/git.spool
> EO>    magically appear in the drafts group so I can edit the cover letter
> EO>    and possibly annotate some of the other messages too before sending
> EO>    the off.
>
> I don't know that piece, sorry.  But it can probably be automated with
> some effort.  I know the drafts group is special.  "Lars" special.
>
> You could maybe start an gnus-slave session with a new buffer in
> message-mode, insert the message, and save it as a draft?

You can use (setq gnus-agent-queue-mail 'always) to queue all outgoing
messages in the draft folder.  Insert messages into gnus with the
following function (which you can put into ~/.emacs"):


(defun my-gnus-group-mail (arg)
  "Start composing a mail.
Use the group given in ARG to find a posting style."
  (interactive "P")
  ;; We can't `let' gnus-newsgroup-name here, since that leads
  ;; to local variables leaking.
  (let ((group gnus-newsgroup-name)
	;; make sure last viewed article doesn't affect posting styles:
	(gnus-article-copy)
	(buffer (current-buffer)))
    (unwind-protect
	(progn
	  (setq gnus-newsgroup-name arg)
	  ;; #### see comment in gnus-setup-message -- drv
	  (gnus-setup-message 'message (message-mail)))
      (with-current-buffer buffer
	(setq gnus-newsgroup-name group)))))


Then call emacsclient like:


emacsclient -e '(my-gnus-group-mail "example.group")'


Gnus should be running before you call above function.

When you use a posting style for "example.group" that involves something
like (body :file "~/example-group-template.txt"), you can create an
email from the command line or from a script to pull in your patch as an
attachment.  You get a buffer to edit the mail, so you don´t need to
queue up all outgoing mail.  Of course, you could also point to the
patch file rather than a template that includes it as an attachment to
have the patch directly in the message.

For varying recipients and subjects, I´m using something like ("To"
:file "~/email-template-header-to.txt") and ("Subject" :file
"~/email-template-header-subject.txt") in the posting style.

These files are generated by a perl script.  I suppose you could write
one that draws in your patches and sends them off with gnus.


This works fine, though gnus should have some way to automatically send
messages from a script/command line, optionally allowing you to edit the
message before sending it out.  The way I´m doing it is going to some
lengths to get there.  We shouldn´t need to use mutt or the like to
generate messages which we Cc: or Bcc: to ourselves to get them into
gnus, especially not when we use emacs to edit them before sending them
anyway ...


-- 
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