Re: [RFC PATCH 2/4] doc: gitbreaking-changes: replace msg-ids with URLs

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 30, 2026, 19:45 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqeceaa5h9.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <ar0OltAkeTiCx81c@pks.im>

Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Mon, Sep 28, 2026 at 12:41:26PM +0200, kristofferhaugsbakk@fastmail.com wrote:
>> From: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name>
>> 
>> This document has used msg-ids to reference emails since its
>> inception.[1] This makes the text a bit more terse, and is perhaps
>> also convenient for people who can use msg-ids to link to messages
>> in their inbox. But we should consider how convenient this is for people
>> in general, now that this is a more public-facing page (see previous
>> commit). And I suspect that most people will be forced to paste the
>> msg-id according to the described URL template:
>> 
>>     https://lore.kernel.org/git/$message_id/
>> 
>> Let’s instead replace all of the msg-ids with complete links. That way
>> everyone can jump right to the discussions.
>
> Fair. The links may of course break if at any point in time
> lore.kernel.org were to vanish or change its interface. But if so we can
> adapt accordingly, also because the message ID can still be extracted
> trivially.

One caveat is that some "funny characters" in message IDs need to be URL-encoded.

A recent example I saw was <20260930061524.GNkIK%taahol@utu.fi>; https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260930061524.GNkIK%25taahol@utu.fi/ is the URL you need to visit to view the message.

Having said that, I am somewhat negative on what this particular patch does. We should instead give both, having something like

 cf. https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqa59i45wc.fsf@gitster.g/[<xmqqa59i45wc.fsf@gitster.g>^]

in the source, and render a readable link text with reachable href when shown in the browser.