Re: How to send patch with so many files changes?

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 06:19:39AM +0530, Tony Wayne wrote:
> These changes are for core ,I think it would be better to either move whole
> changes to core or contrib as an extension.

Please avoid top-posting. The community mailing lists use
bottom-posting, to ease discussions. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Bottom-posting

> On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 6:09 AM David G. Johnston <
> david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Usually you'd want to use format-patch so your commit message(s) make it
>> into the artifact. Especially for something complex/large.

The community wiki has some guidelines about all that:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch

In my experience, it is much easier to sell a feature to the community
if a patch is organized into independent useful pieces with
refactoring pieces presented on top of the actual feature. In order
to achieve that `git format-patch` is essential because it is possible
to present a patch set organizing your ideas so as others need to
spend less time trying to figure out what a patch set is doing when
doing a review. format-patch with `git am` is also quite good to
track the addition of new files or the removal of old files. Writing
your ideas in the commit logs can also bring a lot of insight for
anybody reading your patches.

For simpler and localized changes, using something like git diff would
be also OK that can be applied with a simple `patch` command can also
be fine. I've done plenty of work with patches sent to the lists this
way for bug fixes. Of course this is case-by-case, for rather complex
bug fixes format-patch can still be a huge gain of time when reading
somebody else's ideas on a specific matter.
--
Michael