You don't send a diff, you send an e-mail formatted by git. So you get all the commits you put in it, it's really just like seeing the commits in a GitHub PR.

So the reviewer receives the commits, with their descriptions, authors, everything. Just like pulling a branch, really.

You do lose the information about where to apply the patch. This isn't a big problem for rebase-friendly crowd. But people who prefer the merge strategy strictly may not like it.

AFAICS there's `--base=auto` which captures explicit parent's sha in the patch text output (there's also a git config option to do that automatically).

Source: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patch#_base_tree_informa...

Thank you for the information! This is the first time I'm hearing about it. Would you happen to know how this information is used? Is it just for the maintainer, or is there a tool that can use it? (I couldn't find any other reference)

Last time I checked it was only for maintainers convenience but the idea of using it by some tooling was already being discussed: https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/all-patches-must-incl...