Bug#486619: hg email: wish for access to arbitrary header fields (e.g. In-Reply-To)

[Trent W. Buck]

Package: mercurial
Version: 1.0.1-1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: upstream

Currently, hg email provides switches to set the most important header
fields: BCC, CC, Date, From, Subject and To.

Just now, I wished to hg email a changeset bundle in reply to a BTS
email, and to make sure it was threaded properly, I wished to manually
set the In-Reply-To header field so that it contained the Message-ID
of the original message.  That is, something like

    hg email -r tip --in-reply-to '<97xjbq2affwo.alv07f2200004swkkcwcgo04k at cybersource.com.au>'

It occurred to me that this might as well be genericized, so that
*arbitrary* header fields can be added / overridden.  That is,

    hg email -r tip --header-field 'In-Reply-To: <97xjbq2affwo.alv07f2200004swkkcwcgo04k at cybersource.com.au>'

This prospective switch (--header-field) could be used multiple times, e.g.

    hg email --header-field 'Foo: Bar' --header-field 'Baz: Quux'

Presumably the existing --cc and friends could then be simple wrappers
for this feature.

PS: not CCing directly into upstream roundup because I can't find out
what its email address is (assuming mercurial's roundup instance has
email enabled).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages mercurial depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.7-10     GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  mercurial-common              1.0.1-1    Scalable distributed version contr
ii  python                        2.5.2-1    An interactive high-level object-o
ii  python-support                0.8.1      automated rebuilding support for P
ii  ucf                           3.007      Update Configuration File: preserv

Versions of packages mercurial recommends:
pn  rcs | kdiff3 | tkdiff | meld  <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information