[RFC] Stopping those fat "What's cooking in git.git" threads

Hi,

As far as I remember, it was Petr Baudis who first asked on IRC if these threads (being so big and deep) are annoying for other people as well or not.

I think it's just hard to follow the discussion as the subject is usually not changed, so for example when the subject contains "merge", I carefully read that mail, but I can easily miss such a mail if it's still "What's cooking in".

An other problem with deep threads is that it just doesn't fit in one's screen, so I had to use tricks for example to see if a mail was a reply to my mail or to some other mail.

So here is what I thought about: What about if everyone (except Junio, of course) would change the subject _and_ remove the In-Reply-To: header when replying to those mails?

If those large threads just annoys a few people and most people are happy with the current situation then sorry for the noise.

Thanks.

Hi,

Miklos Vajna wrote:

I agree that changing a subject (with "(was: <oldsubject>)") is nicer to find specific mails later.

"Everyone should" bla usually does not work in open communities.

And why not vice versa? A new "What's cooking in " mail with new cookings could start a new thread instead of replying to old "What's cooking in" mails...

Hm, I don't really care.

Mutt is able to link and break threads with

	#       break-thread         break the thread in two
	&        link-threads         link tagged message to the current one

so I am able to design the threads as I like it ;) (And I am also able to change subjects as I like, so I don't have a problem.)

Regards,
  Stephan

Miklos Vajna <vmiklos@frugalware.org> writes:

I could make "What's cooking" not a follow-up to the previous issue, or perhaps add "(volume 1.6.0, issue 28)" at the end of the Subject.

But I think it is a good idea to change the subject when responding to one part of the message to say which topic your response is about.

I do not know if stripping "In-reply-to" is a great idea, though. They are responses, aren't they?

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 02:05:30PM -0700, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

It was me as well, who did not change the subject; I'll try to pay attention to do so.

Personally I'm fine with mutt's "break thread" feature, I just proposed it because I saw it was mentioned multiple times that gmane does not handle huge threads nicely. But yes, you have reason about keeping the header makes sense as well.

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Or perhaps break it from time to time (on major release perhaps?).

Very good idea.

The problem with above is if you are replying to many points simultaneously.

I think however that patches should rather start a new thread.

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

If a patch is a consequence of a discussion in a thread, I see no reason, why the patch should not be in that thread.

Regards.

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 02:05:30PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

I think responses to the what's cooking mails per se should certainly have in-reply-to set properly. I'm rather wondering if there's some specific reasons why do you keep all the "What's cooking" mails in a single thread? If there is nothing particular, keeping each "What's cooking" report in a separate mail might be easier on a portion of readers. I will use break-thread now (thanks, didn't know about it!) but the practice seems strange to me.

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 11:05 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

The downside of this is that it'll be less easy to see the difference with the previous version. GMail tries to mark text that appeared a previous mail in purple, so new text 'stands out' in the regular black (it's not that good at it though). So WRT to not making them follow ups, an improvement would be a diff with the previous version online somewhere, although I guess the http://tinyurl.com/todobranch is exactly that modulo your (Junio's) comments on the topics.

"Sverre Rabbelier" <alturin@gmail.com> writes:

My vague recollection is that it was Pasky who complained long time ago when "What's in" was not a follow-up to its previous round, which led me to switch my workflow to send them in the current form. You cannot satisfy certain people no matter what you do.

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Add an interdiff at the bottom of the mail? You can't satisfy everybody no matter what you do, but you can come quite far, it usually means you have to do a lot of work to do so though.

"Sverre Rabbelier" <alturin@gmail.com> writes:

Do you think I have an infinite bandwidth?  I don't.

Junio C Hamano wrote:

I would very much prefer that (both of them, really). Thunderbird's threading is not so advanced as mutt's, so I can't break threads so easily.

The most annoying part is that the timebased auto-delete from thunderbird means I get a new thread spawning in the middle of an old partially deleted one. It can be very confusing.

Hi,

[Cc: list trimmed]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

Last time I checked, Thunderbird was Open Source...

Ciao, Dscho

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 09:05:30PM +0000, Junio C Hamano wrote:

  That'd be great, especially since it's trivial with decent MUAs to get
all issues with a filter (l in mutt, kmail/thunderbird has what it
needs, and I would be surprised if GNUS or pine cannot do that).

Hi,

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Pierre Habouzit wrote:

But what you lose is the ability to tell "this cooking came directly after that cooking".

And in the GMane interface, it is sure a nice thing to be able to go back and forth between cookings in a thread.

Ciao, Dscho