Documentation: explain how to check for patch corruption

SubmittingPatches has some excellent advice about how to check a patch
for corruption before sending it off.  Move it to the format-patch
manual so it can be installed with git's documentation for use by
people not necessarily interested in the git project's practices.

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 46 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/git-format-patch.txt b/Documentation/git-format-patch.txt
index 155b7ae3cb..8bf6a68501 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-format-patch.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-format-patch.txt
@@ -286,6 +286,52 @@ title is likely to be different from the subject of the discussion the
 patch is in response to, so it is likely that you would want to keep
 the Subject: line, like the example above.
 
+Checking for patch corruption
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+Many mailers if not set up properly will corrupt whitespace.  Here are
+two common types of corruption:
+
+* Empty context lines that do not have _any_ whitespace.
+
+* Non-empty context lines that have one extra whitespace at the
+  beginning.
+
+One way to test if your MUA is set up correctly is:
+
+* Send the patch to yourself, exactly the way you would, except
+  with To: and Cc: lines that do not contain the list and
+  maintainer address.
+
+* Save that patch to a file in UNIX mailbox format.  Call it a.patch,
+  say.
+
+* Apply it:
+
+    $ git fetch <project> master:test-apply
+    $ git checkout test-apply
+    $ git reset --hard
+    $ git am a.patch
+
+If it does not apply correctly, there can be various reasons.
+
+* The patch itself does not apply cleanly.  That is _bad_ but
+  does not have much to do with your MUA.  You might want to rebase
+  the patch with linkgit:git-rebase[1] before regenerating it in
+  this case.
+
+* The MUA corrupted your patch; "am" would complain that
+  the patch does not apply.  Look in the .git/rebase-apply/ subdirectory and
+  see what 'patch' file contains and check for the common
+  corruption patterns mentioned above.
+
+* While at it, check the 'info' and 'final-commit' files as well.
+  If what is in 'final-commit' is not exactly what you would want to
+  see in the commit log message, it is very likely that the
+  receiver would end up hand editing the log message when applying
+  your patch.  Things like "Hi, this is my first patch.\n" in the
+  patch e-mail should come after the three-dash line that signals
+  the end of the commit message.
+
 
 EXAMPLES
 --------