Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 1/4] IOMMU: allow MSI message to IRTE propagation to fail

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 28/03/13 08:25, Jan Beulich wrote:
> > > > On 27.03.13 at 15:55, George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Did you look at the mail in your mailreader, or in the raw mail format?
> In the mail reader of course (after all I expect you to use a mail
> client too). And as said, I saw some damage when looking at the
> copy on lists.xen.org.
>
> > If you're using your mail reader, it's probably interpreting the
> > wordwrap stuff properly.  The "raw" mail looks like this:
> >
> > http://marc.info/?l=xen-devel&m=136428861403115&q=raw
> >
> > The above is what GMail sees if I click "show original", and also what
> > the Citrix mail system gives me if I save the mail as a file. This
> > mangling is apparently called "quoted-printable":
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable
> >
> > The problem is that "patch" (and thus "git apply", "git am", "hg
> > import", &c &c), not being a mail-reader, doesn't know how to de-mangle
> > stuff.
> And rightly so. But your mail client saving the mail should deal with
> this properly. (And besides, if you already save the mail, I don't
> see why you can't instead save the attachment).
This is already a longer discussion than I really wanted to have, but 
just so you have an idea what I'm on about, I'll explain the difference.
The key thing is that "git am" will take an mbox file with a series of 
patches and automatically make a commit for each one.  So my algorithm 
for reviewing patch series sent in text/plain is as follows:
1. In Gmail, mark each patch in the series and save it to a special folder.
2. Open up mutt on my local box.  It will connect to gmail and open that 
folder.
3. Mark each patch in the series and save it to a local folder in ~/mail/.
4. Use git am to import the whole series as a sequence of commits.
5. View the changeset "in situ" using various git commands ('git meld' 
is my favorite ATM).
Marking each one might take 10 seconds, and it's almost entirely 
brainless; the main "cognitive load" is just remembering the name that 
I've given the local mail folder.  A series of 40 patches takes 
basically no more cognitive load to download and import into my git tree 
than a single patch.
To view yours at the moment, I have to do the following:
1. For each patch in the series, click to download the attachment and 
save it to a separate file
2. Edit each file to include "From: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>" at 
the top, so it looks sufficiently like an mbox that "git am" won't complain
3. For each patch in the series, run "git am" on it individually.

So #1 is slightly more annoying, as saving is more like 2 seconds per 
mail and marking a message is like 0.5 seconds per mail.  But the big 
source of cognitive load is having to deal with the different name of 
each patch.  It's just that extra little bit when having to open the 
file to add the header, and particularly then having to figure out what 
order the patches go in.  It doesn't really take that much extra time, 
but that it takes attention to remember the filename, and this adds up 
for each patch in the series; so the longer the series, the more 
cognitive load it generates.
They've done studies that show that even a minimal amount of cognitive 
load has an effect on people's endurance for other cognitive 
activities.  This is why most successful people instinctively find a way 
to make the unimportant decisions in their lives really simple -- 
spending time thinking about what to wear or what to eat eats away at 
precious energy they would rather spend on running the country or 
whatever it is they're doing.
Given the limited amount of head-space I have for arbitrary strings of 
things, I'd prefer to spend it on actually understanding the patch, 
rather than on patch filenames if I can avoid it; that's why I brought 
it up.
It seems like having an automated way to send off an entire patch queue, 
rather than cutting and pasting and attaching each mail individually, 
would reduce the cognitive load for you as well (not to mention probably 
save you several minutes of your day).  git and mercurial both have 
really good integrated mechanisms to do that; both also have extensions 
that allow you interact with the repository just like you do with 
quilt.  I'm not familiar with the git ones, but the mercurial one uses 
almost exactly the same commands as quilt, but with "hg" instead of 
"quilt" at the front (if I remember quilt correctly -- it's been a long 
time since I used it).
If you're not willing to find a way to send it text/plain, could you 
maybe at least name the attachments "01-[whatever].patch" 
"02-[whatever].patch"?  I think that would help reduce the cognitive 
load quite a bit.
Thanks,
 -George

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