Re: [PATCH RFC 1/6] Re: send-email: Add --delay for separating emails

From: Andreas Ericsson <exon@op5.com>
Date: Apr 7, 2009, 22:17 UTC
Message-ID: <49DBD112.5000705@op5.se>
In-Reply-To: <20090407220854.GA12908@vidovic>

Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

> On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 05:51:43PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> 
>>> When sending a patch series, the emails often arrive at the final
>>> destination out of order; though these emails should be chained
>>> via the In-Reply-To headers, some mail-viewing systems display
>>> by order of arrival instead.
>>>
>>> The --delay option provides a means for specifying that there
>>> should be a certain number of seconds of delay between sending
>>> emails, so that the arrival order can be controlled better.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>
> 
>> I think it may still be reasonable to implement a solution that only
>> covers some of the cases, but I what I am asking is if we know what
>> percentage of the cases that is. If we are preventing only 1% of
>> out-of-order deliveries with this, I question whether it is worth the
>> bother.
> 
> IMHO, this improvement is broken by design. We try to fix a
> receiver-only issue by a sender side fix.
> 
> If the receiver wants the patch series be in a good ordered _for sure_, he
> has to switch to a client mail supporting the In-Reply-To chains.
>

The biggest problem with in-reply-to chains is that they're absolutely horrible for patch-series of more than five or so messages. The "worst" one this week was a series of 14 patches, I believe. If any of the deeper nested patches gets any sort of commentary, it usually eats so much horizontal screen estate that it becomes hopeless to actually find anything.

Besides that, most mua's I've worked with list emails in a thread like this:

 First
  +------ second
  |         +------ third
  |         |
  |         +---- reply to second
  |                 +
  |                 |
  |                 + reply to reply to second
  |
  +-- reply to first

etc. etc, but when asked for "next unread message in thread", they jump to the *deepest* message in the thread first, so you end up reading the replies to the patches in the wrong order anyway.

For those two reasons, I absolutely loathe deeply nested in-reply-to chains.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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