Re: mailing list redirect for bug numbers? - Mailing list pgsql-www

Greetings,

* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> > * Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> >> Agreed.  If we have bug numbers assigned to messages that aren't bugs,
> >> or are replies to bugs, it's just going to be a mess.
>
> > In my suggestion, replies to bugs that are sent by a sensible MUA would
> > have the bug # of the bug being replied to-
>
> Uh, how?  Assuming that "your suggestion" refers to the 'X-Pg-BugId'
> idea, I think the chances of that being included in replies are nil.

As I said, it would be done in the same way that our archives already
figure out threading and pglister could then add it.

If we want something that would work with replies for direct CC, then
we'd have to (ab)use a field that we know MUAs will copy to the next
email on a reply and there's unfortunately few of those.  At least
some bug trackers have dedicated email addresses for individual bugs,
probably for that reason, among others.

> > In other words, we'd add a header like:
> >    X-PG-MessageId: 123453
> > And then be able to use links like:
> > https://postgr.es/p/pgsql-hackers/123453
>
> Seems like this is reinventing message-ids, and not very well either,

What's being asked for certainly seemed like something that's very much
like a message-ID to me, but shorter so that it fits more conveniently
into commit messages and other places.  As such, it's not exactly
coincidence that this suggestion seems pretty similar to a message-id.

> 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..?

> > Just to wrap this up, what I'm trying to get at is that I'd rather we
> > try to solve for the specific issue that came up rather than building a
> > solution on something that's already only a partial answer to begin
> > with, in that we often want to link from the commits to discussions on
> > -hackers or to emails to -bugs that didn't have a bug # and those aren't
> > addressed with this particular approach.
>
> The existing solution is "use the message-id", and that seems to work
> well enough.  Yes, gmail's message-ids are annoyingly long, but that
> seems like only a cosmetic objection.  I'm not seeing anything here that
> really looks like it'd be an improvement.

I'm not particularly against using message IDs, just to be clear, but
what started this was a complaint regarding them.

Going back to Andres' original ask on this subject, his justification
was:

On 1/14/19 5:18 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> It'd be neat to link to bugs from commit messages in a clearer format
> (i.e. to the bug number, rather than it being one of potentially
> multiple message ids), and it also makes manual lookup nicer.

I took 'clearer format' to be implying 'shorter'.  The 'manual lookup'
comment would seem to imply, to me at least, that it'd be nicer for
cases where the commit message is "Fixed bug #12345", so there's two
sides to that- one is what goes in the commit message and the other is
how to look up what's in the commit message.

If we're just going to put 'Bug #X' in the commit message for cases
where there's a bug number, then we need to provide a better way to look
up what that bug is, and that's fine- but it doesn't help cases when
bugs get sent directly to the bugs list, which is unfortunate, and it
doesn't help at all for "Discussion" type links that go to threads on
-hackers.

I'm not sure that I get the concern around 'multiple message IDs' as any
of them really would work to get one to the thread and then either the
archives or your MUA could probably figure out the thread, though my
tendency would be to just link to the first message ID in the thread.

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).

Thanks!

Stephen