Re: followup to bug report not included in bug tracker; diverseautomatic Subject lines; ACK noise

[Don Armstrong]

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Drew Adams wrote:
> > There needs to be some way of knowing which bug you're talking about.
> > Normally with debbugs this is done using
> > address@hidden mailing address. However, because emacs
> > has been using mailing lists to track bugs for a long time, the
> > decision was made to use the existing code in debbugs which is capable
> > of associating a mail with a specific bug based on the subject. MUAs
> > generally keep the subject intact, and the beginning of the subject is
> > the part that's least likely to be munged by anything, save adding Re:
> > or similar. 
> 
> I don't follow all of that, sorry.

Understanding all of that is a prerequsite for demanding changes,
otherwise having a discussion about the desired functionality is a
waste of my time in its entirety.

> Please keep the Subject line intact. It is annoying to have multiple different
> strings of text prepended to the Subject line. Here is another example:
> 
>  bug#400: Acknowledgement (23.0.60; C-h v should pick up
>  lispified name in Customize)

This is an acknowledgement mail; it's only sent to the sender of a
bug, and no one else. Responding to it will keep the threading, so
it's no big deal.

> The (35-character!!) prefix "bug#400: Acknowledgement (23.0.60; " just
> obfuscates things for the user and makes it difficult to group messages about
> the same bug together in a mail client. 

If your mail client is incapable of threading using References: and
In-Reply-To:, then I submit that your MUA is broken, not debbugs.
Subjects change in threads, and informing the user in the subject as
to the action thbat was taken to a given message is useful and
informative, and enables users to deal with messages rapidly.
 
> The implementation of the tracker might impose certain constraints, but every
> effort should be made to make things easy for the user. Do whatever you need 
> to
> do under the covers, but the mail thread should remain intact. 

Everything that the tracker does has been utilized for years in
Debian. All of those features do actually make it easier to.]
 
> > > There seems to be no such thing as a (single) thread for a given bug
> > > anymore. And that's not to mention all of the generated ACK messages
> > > that constitute essentially noise. Pretty silly.
> > 
> > You can ditch the ack messages by adding "X-Debbugs-No-Ack: yes" or
> > similar to your headers; the ack messages are on by default primarily
> > for casual users.
> 
> No idea what that means. My mail client does not, AFAIK, let me do that. 

What hideously broken mail client are we talking about here?

> And it is not the existence of the ACK messages that is annoying so
> much as it is their content and Subject lines.

So everything about them?


Don Armstrong

-- 
Fate and Temperament are two words for one and the same concept.
 -- Novalis [Hermann Hesse _Demian_]

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu