Re: What's cooking in git.git (Aug 2017, #05; Tue, 22)

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 15, 2017, 21:22 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq377nwtbe.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.21.1.1709152214100.219280@virtualbox>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Sat, 16 Sep 2017, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
>> 
>> > If you want *contributors* to ping the thread themselves, how about
>> > *posting your updates there, too*?
>> 
>> I do not understand this comment at all.  That is what I and others
>> already and always do by responding to the patches, and when trying
>> to see if a topic is still alive, with thread-specific responses and
>> pings.
>> 
>> If you are demanding that "What's cooking" report to be sent as a
>> response to all the topics, that will *NOT* going to happen.  It is
>> meant to give a summary of the current state to help contributors
>> and reviewers be aware of what is happening across the entire tree
>> and not limited to a specific topic.
>
> If that is the case, you will have to be okay with others responding to
> your "What's cooking" mails instead of the original threads.

Yes and no. When I say "This topic waits for a reroll" and somebody (not necessarily the author of the topic) wants to remind me that a reroll has already been posted (or worse--I queued the updated version but forgot to update the message), I do appreciate that the reply is made to the "What's cooking" report. When there is "This topic waits for a response to a review comment" and the responder wants to respond to the review comment, the reply should be made in response to that review comment. Otherwise, the discussion will lose the continuity.

And as you alluded to, we may need to see if we can help making it easier to do the latter when needed.

> That's what
> you are buying into by having these "What's cooking" mails that are in no
> usable way connected to the original threads.

For the above reason, I do not think this is a particularly useful stance to take. Do you have a concrete suggestion to make these individual entries more helpful for people who may want go back to the original thread in doing so? In-reply-to: or References: fields of the "What's cooking" report would not help. I often have the message IDs that made/helped me make these individual comments in the description; they alone would not react to mouse clicks, though.

Having said that, I'd expect that individual contributors have past messages pertaining to the smaller numbers of their own topics in flight in their mailbox than the project wide "What's cooking" report covers, so perhaps an affort to devise such a mechanism may result in an over-engineering waste nobody finds useful. I dunno.