From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:30:58 GMT
Subject: "mailinfo: Remove only one set of square brackets" considered harmful
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