zunzuncito

wolf

In the previous post I talked about a couple of different ways to apply patches with mutt(1) or neomutt(1). Turns out Maildir might not be the best format to use for git-am(1) because its files are not guaranteed to be in any specific order (per spec they need only carry unique names).

As git-am(1) does not sort its input, patches might be applied in the wrong order. This came up on the mailing list as well, all the way back in 2013. A fix specific to Maildir files created by mutt(1) was added in 18505c3.

Sadly neomutt(1) changed this format 5 years ago, removing the sequence number that git-am(1) relies on in commit 75b3708 and replacing it with a call to mutt_rand64(). I can only assume no one is using neomutt(1) to export patches to Maildir, since having patches applied in the wrong order is a pretty significant problem.

For now I recommend using the mbox format instead when exporting patches. Whilst that doesn't guarantee a specific order either, usually mail clients are nice enough to export mails to mbox in the order they are shown.

The core issue remains until git-am(1) learns to sort mails itself.