21 february 2026
A few days ago I made my first contribution to git 🥳🥳🥳
The --from option was ignored for the cover letter when using git
format-patch. My single line of code change turned into a whole thread.
Never expected for a small change like that to generate so much chatter.
In some of the emails sent to the threads, developers were complaining
how the default template for the cover letter was pretty useless. It
uses the output from git shortlog which admittedly is not really a
great overview for patch series.
Anyway, now my changes are scheduled to be merged to master and I'm
now waiting on some feedback on a new template for the cover letter. The
template I had in mind was the following:
[1/3] 3f417cb9: this is a commit message
[2/3] a8e89346: this is another commit message
...
I was thinking about having also the names of the authors on the
trailing lines, but throughout the codebase I couldn't find a
standardized way do deserialize the name the author of a commit from a
commit object. If I decide to add them I'll probably end up writing a
helper function to stick in commit.c 'cause it's wild that every
single module does the deserialization in its own way.