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

From: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Date: Aug 28, 2020, 21:01 UTC
Message-ID: <C58XLLAE3SMA.3T1C6DXZ4VSWA@homura>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqk0xio59r.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On Fri Aug 28, 2020 at 5:00 PM EDT, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> "Drew DeVault" <sir@cmpwn.com> writes:
>
> > "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.
>
> "Type the value you would have given to --in-reply-to command line
> option (if you forgot to use it), or leave this field empty"
> perhaps? Those who do not know should be able to learn what
> "--in-reply-to" is. A prompt help is not the place to do a
> documentation.

This would be better, yeah, but at that point it's pretty weird, like why are we prompting for this CLI flag and not any others? The answer is just for legacy reasons. There's no inherent justification for it.

Show 7 quoted lines

> > I hate to be a nuisance over such a seemingly simple problem, but there
> > are a lot of new users who are struggling here and I care about their
> > struggle. What path should we take to fixing this issue for them?
>
> The ideal way would be to craft step (0) well enough so that new
> users trigger the To: prompt in the first place, which would
> automatically make the problem disappear ;-)

Do you mean teaching users how to use --to upfront? Honestly the prompt seems totally fine to me, there's nothing wrong with a use-case which calls for typing your To address into the prompt. Hell, often I'll use it, or I'll use --annotate and write my To addresses in vim.