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

[Don Armstrong]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Drew Adams wrote:
> Why can't one just reply to the original thread that reported the
> bug?

You can.

> Why change the thread - subject line and email address, so the
> result is multiple email threads for the same bug?

You don't have to.

> I now have to use search to find matches for keywords ("foo") in the
> Subject. Why?

If people just use reply, it'll be in the same thread. If they don't,
it won't currently, but there's a wishlist bug open to automatically
join it to the thread.

> If you want to refer to the bug as bug #99 or attach the release
> info 23.0.60 to it, why not do that in the message body?

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. 

Finally emailing bugs-gnu-emacs@ or address@hidden is exactly the
same for bugs that are in emacs.

It's possible that this was the wrong decision, and we should disable
entirely messages sent directly to the mailing list, but that's how
it's set up now.

> Or, if you really must change the Subject line, append instead of
> prepend the extra identifying info.

The wishlist bug for automagic threading will resolve this; see above.
[And in any event, all messages that actually go through the bug
tracker will have the same leading bits of the subject anyway, so they
should sort together.]
 
> 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.


Don Armstrong

-- 
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the    
right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
 -- Bach 

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