Re: [PATCH] send-email: do not prompt for In-Reply-To

From: Raymond E. Pasco <ray@ameretat.dev>
Date: Aug 28, 2020, 20:58 UTC
Message-ID: <C58XJ602TKUG.33AM95HQC9OZ4@ziyou.local>
In-Reply-To: <C58UKAYKF1ZY.V5LLW3DY1KAY@homura>

On Fri Aug 28, 2020 at 2:39 PM EDT, Drew DeVault wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> "You can give an empty answer if you are not responding to any message"
> could confuse users, because they might think -v2 is a "response", or
> maybe they've written the patch in response to a discussion on the
> -users mailing list, or any other number of reasons. Now they have to
> figure out how to answer this prompt, even if the mailing list they're
> sending it to isn't expecting it to be a reply. I came up with a number
> of alternative wordings but they all ultimately failed to this same
> problem.

These *are* all reasons why a patch would be sent as a reply. You can moderate your own lists however you like, but that does not mean that patches being replies to other mails is 1) wrong or useless, or 2) not in wide use. I wish the user experience were a bit smoother for those of us who aren't dedicated Emacs manglers, but things like scissors lines help a bit.

> "Legitimate" use-cases like qemu-devel or not, this is only ever going
> to confuse new users, and I think that qemu is wrong for encouraging
> users to deal with it.

qemu-devel was given by Carlo as an example of a list which does *not* keep discussion together in threads; the example give of a list which *does* keep things together in threads was the Git list itself (surely the normative list for Git, if there is such a thing). It's too useful to hackers (and presumably maintainers), I don't think anyone is going to stop.

Looking at this in isolation from the polemics about list practices, it's pretty clear that the way send-email prompts for things is not logical. Axing the In-Reply-To prompt would be one way to make it logical, because the only other prompt is the To prompt; this is removal of a prompt users may expect, but by being so inconsistent, the software itself already removes the prompt when I'm expecting it!

There may be other ways to make it logical, like having the appearance of the In-Reply-To prompt depend solely on whether a message ID was already provided or not (but since a message ID is not mandatory, it's weird to prompt for it and not for, say, additional CCs).

Since every mail client I've ever seen has a "reply" button, I don't think the concept of a reply is eldritch arcana that users must be protected from. It's annoying to have to get a Message-ID and paste it, sure. It would be nice if a mail client could do that for me (I think dedicated Emacs manglers are insulated from this problem for that reason). Probably whoever prompted for it in the first place just didn't want to flub a message by leaving it out, which wouldn't be an issue for a client command invoked as some variation on "reply all".