diff mbox series

[RFC] mailsplit: add option to extract PATCH M/N numbers

Message ID 20240313010040.1828970-1-jacob.e.keller@intel.com (mailing list archive)
State New
Headers show
Series [RFC] mailsplit: add option to extract PATCH M/N numbers | expand

Commit Message

Jacob Keller March 13, 2024, 12:58 a.m. UTC
From: Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>

git mailsplit splits a mailbox into files, which are then fed into git
mailinfo to extract patch and subject data. This data is used by git am
to apply patches from an email file, whether its a maildir or an mbox
file.

In some cases, the order of emails within an mbox does not reflect the
actual patch order. I often find this the case when I download a
t.mbox.gz file from a public inbox archive.

When this occurs, git am will just try applying patches in whatever
order they appear in the mbox, without any attempt to sort or order
based on the actual patch numbers.

As an initial attempt at enabling such functionality, implement
--extract-patch-from-subject into git mailsplit.

This will cause the mailsplit command to store files in
<total>_<nr>_<count> files instead of just using the mail count as
currently.

This ordering should be generally useful as it sorts nicely when sorting
the files alphanumerically.

The extraction implementation is pretty rough, as I wasn't sure if we
had more robust string matching. I tried to use strchr and some
assumptions about how patch formatting is done. It looks for a block
with "[ .. PATCH .. (sp)M/N]" and tries to copy the M and N out of the
string and then extract the numbers using atoi. If any of this fails, it
falls back to M=0 and N=0 when formatting the file names.

The end result is that files split from the mailbox or maildir have
prefixed 000N_000M_000C rather than just using the count of mail files
within the mailbox.

To allow this to work nicely, I used fgetpos and fsetpos to move through
the file stream while searching for the subject line. This doesn't work
with stdin so this support only works if you are processing a real file
and not processing from stdin.

Signed-off-by: Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>
---

I'm sending this as an RFC because its pretty ugly and I didn't completely
finish the work to combine this with git-am. The goal is to have all the
mails extracted from mailsplit nicely sort along subject lines so that git
am will apply a series in the order that the subject lines specify rather
than assuming the mails were received and stored in the correct order.

Its frustrating to download an mbox file and then have to manually re-sort
or re-apply patches because it failed to extract things nicely. I don't know
if this approach is the best solution, or whether there's something else we
could do instead. In theory we probably want something more robust for the
M/N extraction over using strchr, memrchr, and whatnot....

 builtin/mailsplit.c | 126 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
 1 file changed, 116 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)

Comments

Junio C Hamano March 13, 2024, 8:11 p.m. UTC | #1
Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com> writes:

> Its frustrating to download an mbox file and then have to manually re-sort
> or re-apply patches because it failed to extract things nicely. I don't know
> if this approach is the best solution, or whether there's something else we
> could do instead. In theory we probably want something more robust for the
> M/N extraction over using strchr, memrchr, and whatnot....
>
>  builtin/mailsplit.c | 126 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
>  1 file changed, 116 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/builtin/mailsplit.c b/builtin/mailsplit.c
> index 3af9ddb8ae5c..5255f4056e91 100644
> --- a/builtin/mailsplit.c
> +++ b/builtin/mailsplit.c
> @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
>  #include "strbuf.h"
>  
>  static const char git_mailsplit_usage[] =
> -"git mailsplit [-d<prec>] [-f<n>] [-b] [--keep-cr] -o<directory> [(<mbox>|<Maildir>)...]";
> +"git mailsplit [-d<prec>] [-f<n>] [-b] [--keep-cr] [--extract-patch-from-subject] -o<directory> [(<mbox>|<Maildir>)...]";

"extract patch from subject" is quite a mouthful and more
importantly, I suspect that it is different from what the option
does (unless the sender is cramming the log message and the patch on
a single title line).

This seems to try parsing the numbers out of the prefixes like
"[PATCH v2 04/18]" but I wonder if it has to understand four and
eighteen in such a header.  Doesn't the sending side make sure that
the patches will be in the right order if you sort the message in
your MUA by the subject textually?  After all, such a numbering
convention is to aid humans to read them in order in a mailbox.

I also wonder if it is enough to run the commit title (before
stripping out the "[PATCH v4 04/18]" part) through
format_sanitized_subject() to derive the patch file name.  At the
receiving end, they have to be prepared to take a non-number with
your patch anyway, and when things go wrong, peeking the directory
may become easier.  I dunno.

> +	if (found) {
> +		*nr = atoi(m_buf.buf);
> +		*total = atoi(n_buf.buf);
> +	} else {
> +		*nr = 0;
> +		*total = 0;
> +	}

Having said all that, I also wonder if we want to simplify this to
the other extreme.  When we accept such a 18-patch series that is
stored in a mailbox file in a wrong order, we do not even care about
"/18" part of "[PATCH v2 04/18]".  So instead of worrying about
total at all, how about "--use-patchnum-from-subject" that only uses
the "04" part of "[PATCH v2 04/18]" as the output filename?  We
would probably still want to count how many messges we processed and
as long as we need to parse out "04" out of "04/18", we'd probably
parse "18" as well, so we can maintain a bitmap to ensure we saw all
the messages without duplicates, or something.

The reason why I care is because such a scheme would be easier for
existing consumers that are prepared to take ...

> -		char *name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d", dir, nr_prec, ++skip);

... only numbers in their filenames, and not ...

> ...
> +			name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d_%0*d_%0*d", dir, nr_prec, total, nr_prec, nr, nr_prec, ++skip);

... a string like "04_18".

Overall, I like the idea of massaging a mailbox that got patches in
shuffled order to make it usable.  In addition to the "sort the
shuffled mess" benefit, it would allow us to drop the cover letter
and pick only the patch messages.  I just am not happy with the
output "04_18", and the parsing code, as you said, is yucky indeed.

And of course totally outside the Git tools scope, I wonder if this
is something "formail" should be able to do more naturally.
Jacob Keller March 14, 2024, 12:03 a.m. UTC | #2
On 3/13/2024 1:11 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com> writes:
> 
>> Its frustrating to download an mbox file and then have to manually re-sort
>> or re-apply patches because it failed to extract things nicely. I don't know
>> if this approach is the best solution, or whether there's something else we
>> could do instead. In theory we probably want something more robust for the
>> M/N extraction over using strchr, memrchr, and whatnot....
>>
>>  builtin/mailsplit.c | 126 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
>>  1 file changed, 116 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/builtin/mailsplit.c b/builtin/mailsplit.c
>> index 3af9ddb8ae5c..5255f4056e91 100644
>> --- a/builtin/mailsplit.c
>> +++ b/builtin/mailsplit.c
>> @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
>>  #include "strbuf.h"
>>  
>>  static const char git_mailsplit_usage[] =
>> -"git mailsplit [-d<prec>] [-f<n>] [-b] [--keep-cr] -o<directory> [(<mbox>|<Maildir>)...]";
>> +"git mailsplit [-d<prec>] [-f<n>] [-b] [--keep-cr] [--extract-patch-from-subject] -o<directory> [(<mbox>|<Maildir>)...]";
> 
> "extract patch from subject" is quite a mouthful and more
> importantly, I suspect that it is different from what the option
> does (unless the sender is cramming the log message and the patch on
> a single title line).
> 

Yea, I didn't really have a good suggestion for a name.

> This seems to try parsing the numbers out of the prefixes like
> "[PATCH v2 04/18]" but I wonder if it has to understand four and
> eighteen in such a header.  Doesn't the sending side make sure that
> the patches will be in the right order if you sort the message in
> your MUA by the subject textually?  After all, such a numbering
> convention is to aid humans to read them in order in a mailbox.
> 
> I also wonder if it is enough to run the commit title (before
> stripping out the "[PATCH v4 04/18]" part) through
> format_sanitized_subject() to derive the patch file name.  At the
> receiving end, they have to be prepared to take a non-number with
> your patch anyway, and when things go wrong, peeking the directory
> may become easier.  I dunno.
>

I think this would be useful and a more desirable goal than my yucky
extraction of the patch number.


>> +	if (found) {
>> +		*nr = atoi(m_buf.buf);
>> +		*total = atoi(n_buf.buf);
>> +	} else {
>> +		*nr = 0;
>> +		*total = 0;
>> +	}
> 
> Having said all that, I also wonder if we want to simplify this to
> the other extreme.  When we accept such a 18-patch series that is
> stored in a mailbox file in a wrong order, we do not even care about
> "/18" part of "[PATCH v2 04/18]".  So instead of worrying about
> total at all, how about "--use-patchnum-from-subject" that only uses
> the "04" part of "[PATCH v2 04/18]" as the output filename?  We
> would probably still want to count how many messges we processed and
> as long as we need to parse out "04" out of "04/18", we'd probably
> parse "18" as well, so we can maintain a bitmap to ensure we saw all
> the messages without duplicates, or something.


My main issue was "how to actually parse that". But maybe sanitizing the
subject is good enough.

> 
> The reason why I care is because such a scheme would be easier for
> existing consumers that are prepared to take ...
> 
>> -		char *name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d", dir, nr_prec, ++skip);
> 
> ... only numbers in their filenames, and not ...
> 
>> ...
>> +			name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d_%0*d_%0*d", dir, nr_prec, total, nr_prec, nr, nr_prec, ++skip);
> 
> ... a string like "04_18".
> 
> Overall, I like the idea of massaging a mailbox that got patches in
> shuffled order to make it usable.  In addition to the "sort the
> shuffled mess" benefit, it would allow us to drop the cover letter
> and pick only the patch messages.  I just am not happy with the
> output "04_18", and the parsing code, as you said, is yucky indeed.

I agree, I didn't really like the output but was having problems
figuring out how to handle that.

> 
> And of course totally outside the Git tools scope, I wonder if this
> is something "formail" should be able to do more naturally.
> 

Well, in my case, I'm downloading the t.mbox.gz from a lore.kernel.org
server, and it just happens to get patches in seemingly random order.
The lore website itself manages this fine, but for some reason the
thread mbox files are not in the patch order. I don't have (direct)
control over those, and its a hassle especially as the mbox has not just
the patches from the original series, but also the entire set of
replies. It would be convenient to also strip out and skip those as well.

While I do get that this is somewhat outside the scope of git tooling,
its a relatively common problem at least for me. I could probably use a
different tool to parse and order the mailbox first... Hm.

FWIW, i couldn't figure out how to get formail to do what I want, but it
looks like I can write a little python program that can sort messages in
a mailbox using the mailbox module. That would be sufficient to resolve
my needs.

Let me look at the way the format_sanitize_subject thing works out. That
might still be worthwhile for when you want to peek into the folder with
git mailsplit.
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/builtin/mailsplit.c b/builtin/mailsplit.c
index 3af9ddb8ae5c..5255f4056e91 100644
--- a/builtin/mailsplit.c
+++ b/builtin/mailsplit.c
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ 
 #include "strbuf.h"
 
 static const char git_mailsplit_usage[] =
-"git mailsplit [-d<prec>] [-f<n>] [-b] [--keep-cr] -o<directory> [(<mbox>|<Maildir>)...]";
+"git mailsplit [-d<prec>] [-f<n>] [-b] [--keep-cr] [--extract-patch-from-subject] -o<directory> [(<mbox>|<Maildir>)...]";
 
 static int is_from_line(const char *line, int len)
 {
@@ -166,8 +166,83 @@  static int maildir_filename_cmp(const char *a, const char *b)
 	return (unsigned char)*a - (unsigned char)*b;
 }
 
+static int extract_patch_subject(FILE *mbox, int *nr, int *total)
+{
+	struct strbuf tmp, n_buf, m_buf;
+	int found = 0;
+	fpos_t pos;
+	int err;
+
+	err = fgetpos(mbox, &pos);
+	if (err) {
+		error_errno("cannot get file position for %s", mbox);
+		return err;
+	}
+
+	strbuf_init(&tmp, 100);
+	strbuf_init(&n_buf, 10);
+	strbuf_init(&m_buf, 10);
+
+	for (;;) {
+		char *start, *patch, *last_space, *slash, *end;
+
+		if (strbuf_getline(&tmp, mbox))
+			break;
+
+		if (!starts_with(tmp.buf, "Subject:"))
+			continue;
+
+		start = strchr(tmp.buf, '[');
+
+		while (start) {
+			patch = strstr(start, "PATCH");
+			slash = strchr(start, '/');
+			end = strchr(start, ']');
+
+			if (patch && slash && end &&
+			    patch < end && slash < end) {
+
+				last_space = memrchr(patch, ' ', end - patch);
+				if (!last_space || last_space >= end)
+					break;
+
+				found = 1;
+
+				strbuf_reset(&n_buf);
+				strbuf_reset(&m_buf);
+
+				strbuf_add(&m_buf, last_space + 1, slash - last_space - 1);
+				strbuf_add(&n_buf, slash + 1, end - slash - 1);
+
+				break;
+			}
+		}
+
+		break;
+	}
+
+	if (found) {
+		*nr = atoi(m_buf.buf);
+		*total = atoi(n_buf.buf);
+	} else {
+		*nr = 0;
+		*total = 0;
+	}
+
+	strbuf_release(&tmp);
+	strbuf_release(&n_buf);
+	strbuf_release(&m_buf);
+
+	err = fsetpos(mbox, &pos);
+	if (err)
+		error_errno("cannot set file position for %s", mbox);
+		return err;
+
+	return 0;
+}
+
 static int split_maildir(const char *maildir, const char *dir,
-	int nr_prec, int skip)
+	int extract_patch, int nr_prec, int skip)
 {
 	char *file = NULL;
 	FILE *f = NULL;
@@ -197,7 +272,17 @@  static int split_maildir(const char *maildir, const char *dir,
 			goto out;
 		}
 
-		name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d", dir, nr_prec, ++skip);
+		if (extract_patch) {
+			int nr, total;
+
+			if (extract_patch_subject(f, &nr, &total))
+				goto out;
+
+			name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d_%0*d_%0*d", dir, nr_prec, total, nr_prec, nr, nr_prec, ++skip);
+		} else {
+			name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d", dir, nr_prec, ++skip);
+		}
+
 		split_one(f, name, 1);
 		free(name);
 
@@ -214,7 +299,8 @@  static int split_maildir(const char *maildir, const char *dir,
 	return ret;
 }
 
-static int split_mbox(const char *file, const char *dir, int allow_bare,
+static int split_mbox(const char *file, const char *dir,
+		      int extract_patch, int allow_bare,
 		      int nr_prec, int skip)
 {
 	int ret = -1;
@@ -223,8 +309,13 @@  static int split_mbox(const char *file, const char *dir, int allow_bare,
 	FILE *f = !strcmp(file, "-") ? stdin : fopen(file, "r");
 	int file_done = 0;
 
-	if (isatty(fileno(f)))
+	if (isatty(fileno(f))) {
+		if (extract_patch) {
+			error("cannot use --extract-patch-from-subject with stdin");
+			return -1;
+		}
 		warning(_("reading patches from stdin/tty..."));
+	}
 
 	if (!f) {
 		error_errno("cannot open mbox %s", file);
@@ -256,7 +347,20 @@  static int split_mbox(const char *file, const char *dir, int allow_bare,
 	}
 
 	while (!file_done) {
-		char *name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d", dir, nr_prec, ++skip);
+		char *name;
+
+		if (extract_patch) {
+			int nr, total;
+
+			if (extract_patch_subject(f, &nr, &total)) {
+				nr = 0;
+				total = 0;
+			}
+
+			name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d_%0*d_%0*d", dir, nr_prec, total, nr_prec, nr, nr_prec, ++skip);
+		} else {
+			name = xstrfmt("%s/%0*d", dir, nr_prec, ++skip);
+		}
 		file_done = split_one(f, name, allow_bare);
 		free(name);
 	}
@@ -272,7 +376,7 @@  static int split_mbox(const char *file, const char *dir, int allow_bare,
 int cmd_mailsplit(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 {
 	int nr = 0, nr_prec = 4, num = 0;
-	int allow_bare = 0;
+	int allow_bare = 0, extract_patch = 0;
 	const char *dir = NULL;
 	const char **argp;
 	static const char *stdin_only[] = { "-", NULL };
@@ -302,6 +406,8 @@  int cmd_mailsplit(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 			dir = arg+2;
 		} else if (!strcmp(arg, "--mboxrd")) {
 			mboxrd = 1;
+		} else if (!strcmp(arg, "--extract-patch-from-subject")) {
+			extract_patch = 1;
 		} else if ( arg[1] == '-' && !arg[2] ) {
 			argp++;	/* -- marks end of options */
 			break;
@@ -338,7 +444,7 @@  int cmd_mailsplit(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 		int ret = 0;
 
 		if (arg[0] == '-' && arg[1] == 0) {
-			ret = split_mbox(arg, dir, allow_bare, nr_prec, nr);
+			ret = split_mbox(arg, dir, extract_patch, allow_bare, nr_prec, nr);
 			if (ret < 0) {
 				error("cannot split patches from stdin");
 				return 1;
@@ -354,9 +460,9 @@  int cmd_mailsplit(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 		}
 
 		if (S_ISDIR(argstat.st_mode))
-			ret = split_maildir(arg, dir, nr_prec, nr);
+			ret = split_maildir(arg, dir, extract_patch, nr_prec, nr);
 		else
-			ret = split_mbox(arg, dir, allow_bare, nr_prec, nr);
+			ret = split_mbox(arg, dir, extract_patch, allow_bare, nr_prec, nr);
 
 		if (ret < 0) {
 			error("cannot split patches from %s", arg);