Enhance GitLab to emulate the function of git-send-email

Problem to solve

Allow GitLab to support conversion from existing project workflows by accurately emulating git-send-email

Intended users

Developers of existing projects that currently use email based workflows to conduct code review

Further details

Many open source projects currently use email to conduct reviews. This is primarily accomplished by developers writing code in local branches and, when code is ready, using the git-send-email utility to send an email series (usually a cover letter describing the overall change, followed by a series of replies to the cover letter, which each reply containing a git-format-patch formatted version of each changeset in the branch history). Reviews are conducted by replying to either the cover letter or to specific pieces of code in the subsequent emails.

Proposal

Augment the gitlab merge request notification system, so that, in addition to a notification being sent when a merge request is opened, a project may also optionally send each patch in the series to the same notification recipient (usually a mailing list). each email should have its X-GitLab headers configured to route replies to each email, such that replies to the cover letter map to comments in the merge request, and replies to patch emails map to discussions/code snippets/etc

Permissions and Security

The same permissions model that is used to gate acceptance of reply emails to the notification email should be sufficient

Documentation

Unsure

Testing

Assuming relatively low risk, as this is an extension of existing functionality, mapping current UI behavior to an email model

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

success looks like Gitlab successfully emulating the function of git-send-email for a multipatch branch.

Links / references