Re: [PATCH v10 0/3]

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Apr 30, 2019, 21:46 UTC
Message-ID: <nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.1904301740070.45@tvgsbejvaqbjf.bet>
In-Reply-To: <CAC05385Mc7pqiCd5mb+1c4WM+v7K=h=GMHuvkw9xizhRFJXXBA@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Nickolai,

On Mon, 29 Apr 2019, Nickolai Belakovski wrote:

> Sorry, I'm not very accustomed to mailing list development. I had assumed
> that this was being threaded with the other messages in the series, hence
> leaving the subject blank and only putting new info in the body.

The openness of a mailing list-centric development is that everybody with an email address can participate [*1*].

The downside is that *anybody* with *any* mail program can be a reader, so you cannot assume *anything* about how people will read your mails. Some will read it in a mail program that color-codes levels of quotation. Others will not have any color whatsoever. Some thread. Some don't. In most mail programs, you cannot even search for a Message-ID. Which can be non-unique.

So the perceived benefits of this way to run a project come at a price.

> In the future I'll add in an appropriate subject and brief re-hash in the
> body. Thanks for bringing it up.

Thank you, Johannes

Footnote *1*: Of course, it is not *all* that open. If you cannot convince your mail program to send mails in plain text only, and to stop reformatting mails e.g. to make them look better on cell phones (refusing this is the price of requiring patches to be sent in whitespace-preserving plain text emails), then you're not invited to the party. This is why I sometimes say, not altogether without reason, that you can use *any* mail program to participate in the Git project as long as it is `mutt`.