Re: Mail thread references in commits

On 11/19/2016 06:38 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
>> Every proposal along these lines strikes me as making more unobvious
>> hoops for people to jump through. We're just reinventing the wheel here
>> because we don't like the color of the standard wheels that some email
>> MUAs produce.
>
> Yeah, anything like this would be going very very far out of our way to
> keep these lines in commit messages under an arbitrary limit (which we're
> already exceeding anyway in many cases).  I'm inclined to think we should
> just straight up decide that having the message link be a clickable URL is
> worth the longer lines, or that it is not.  Personally I vote for "not",
> but I recognize that I might be in the minority.

Agreed. I'm happy with the status quo. But if we want to make them 
clickable, let's just bite the bullet and start doing:

Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/<message-id>

The point of keeping the lines short is to make the text in the commit 
more pleasant to read, but that hardly applies to a URL.

> BTW, before we give up completely on reconciling the two objectives,
> is anyone aware of a line-continuation convention that would be likely
> to work?  If we could do something like
>
> Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/\
> CAF4Au4w6rrH_j1bvVhzpOsRiHCog7sGJ3LSX0tY8ZdwhHT88LQ@mail.gmail.com
>
> it would improve matters all around.

That would make it more difficult to parse programmatically, as you 
couldn't just grep lines beginning with "Discussion: ".

Unless we decide to switch to using clickable URLs here, and perhaps 
even if we do, because we already have a lot of current-format 
"Discussion: " lines in the git history, it would be nice to change the 
message archive web interface to know about "Discussion: ". The web 
interface could view those as clickable links. At the moment, not only 
are they not clickable, but the interface even obfuscates them, thinking 
that the message-ids are email addresses, making copy-pasting harder too:

Discussion: <26681(dot)1477940227(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>

- Heikki