Re: "mailinfo: Remove only one set of square brackets" considered harmful

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 15, 2009, 22:09 UTC
Message-ID: <7vljmpegy4.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.01.0907150821280.13838@localhost.localdomain>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 21 quoted lines

> So I see why Andreas did it, and I don't disagree violently, BUT...
>
> The fact is, we have mailing lists etc that add their own headers to the 
> subject, and they know they can add things in brackets. The most obvious 
> example is the Linux kernel security list, which adds a prefix of
>
> 	"[Security] "
>
> to the subject line in order to stand out (I'm on other lists that do 
> this too, but those generally don'thave patches).
>>
> So I have emails witgh subjects like
>
> 	Subject: [Security] [patch] random: make get_random_int() more random
>
> but I also have people who do the same thing themselves, eg:
>
> 	Subject: [PATCH -rc] [BUGFIX] x86: fix kernel_trap_sp()
> 	Subject: [BUGFIX][PATCH] fix bad page removal from LRU (Was Re: [RFC][PATCH] ..
>
> so people did kind of depend on the "remove square brackets" behavior.

Thanks. The reason why I have merged some questionable stuff (including this one) early in this cycle was exactly because we would want to catch real world breakages caused by such changes.

Even though it is silly not to rely on already well established conventions such as X-Mailing-List and List-ID but instead to waste precious real estate at the initial part of the Subject in this century merely for list identification purposes, this change regresses the end result.