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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 15, 2009, 22:31 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.01.0907151520380.13838@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <7vljmpegy4.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Wed, 15 Jul 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> 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.

Note that at least for the security list, it's not about "list identification", but simply to make the thing stand out in peoples mailboxes.

But I do agree that it's not perfect, and I would like to make the bracket removal stricter. Andreas' patch was a step in that direction. But different users would probably have different requirements.

For example, from a strictly git tools perspective, it's not even "any square bracket", and some people might want to remove only a single bracketed level, and only if it starts with "[PATCH".

For other uses, we want to remove the "Re: " at the beginning (and some crazy email readers use language/locale-specific versions like "Vs:" for that), and examples like the above "[Security]" from the security list.

So maybe the right solution is to allow people to configure this somehow.

		Linus