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

From
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date
Jul 15, 2009, 15:30 UTC
Message-ID
<alpine.LFD.2.01.0907150821280.13838@localhost.localdomain>
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.

Sure, I end up editing the subject lines (and in that last example I would have had to anyway), but I'm not so sure this was a good change.

The commit log says:
    However, since format-patch only adds one set of square brackets,
    this behaviour is quite easily undesrstood and defended while the
    previous behaviour is not.

but sadly, Andreas totally missed the fact that we're not talking about just format-patch, and that the whole bracket removal is about emails in general.

So I'd suggest at least a setting to reinstate the previous behavior.
			Linus
Next: Junio C Hamano
Message 1 of 4 in “"mailinfo: Remove only one set of square brackets" considered harmful”
  1. Linus TorvaldsJul 15, 2009
  2. Junio C HamanoJul 15, 2009
  3. Junio C HamanoJul 15, 2009
  4. Linus TorvaldsJul 15, 2009

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