Re: mailing list redirect for bug numbers?

Greetings,

* Alvaro Herrera (alvherre@2ndquadrant.com) wrote:
> On 2019-Jan-18, Stephen Frost wrote:
>
> > > since copies received via a direct cc: rather than via the list would
> > > lack the field.  (Hence, you're mistaken to claim this would be
> > > locally searchable.)
> >
> > Ok, it's only locally searchable for people who are subscribed to our
> > mailing lists and keep local copies of the emails they get from our list
> > server, but isn't that going to cover the vast majority of the people
> > who are going to be looking in the commit log and trying to find a
> > matching thread in their local archive..?
>
> It doesn't work in that case either if you're CCed and you get the
> direct copy before the list copy; that one won't have the header.
> In my case I just deduplicate with formail/reformail and it simply
> throws the second one away, and I suspect others do likewise.  I don't
> know what does Gmail do.

I used to do that too but then you may also miss headers from pglister
which direct where the email gets saved, at least for me, so I've gone
away from using a local de-dup system like that based on message ID
(independently, I have also seen idiot mail senders duplicate message
IDs for different messages, which has also made my shy of having
something that just throws away email based on that...).

> > If we just agree to always use the message-ID of the first message in
> > the thread when we're closing out a bug, and people are happy with using
> > message-ID, then I'm not really sure what the bug # is doing for us (and
> > I see that that question from my prior email wasn't answered).
>
> Hmm, sometimes I refer to an intermediate message in a thread, not
> necessarily the first, when something was discovered in the middle of
> some discussion.

That certainly is a perfectly acceptable option, imv, though I suppose
it does complicate things a bit since then you do have the multiple
message IDs question, but if what you really want to link to is
something down in a thread, even if it's a thread with a bug ID, I would
say that the issue is still there even if we add a way to link to bugs
by ID.

I suppose, in the end, committers will still need to be thinking about
what they put in the commit messages regarding links, but then, that's
also not necessairly a bad thing.

Thanks!

Stephen