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

Greetings,

* Magnus Hagander (magnus@hagander.net) wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 4:42 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> > > Doing that in pglister seems like a terrible idea. But if we want to, we
> > > could do it in the actual bug generation form, sure. That would be
> > trivial.
> >
> > Doing it in the bug generation form would only be half a solution
> > though.  Beyond the concern about pglister being too 'PG' specific,
> > what's the issue with having it able to add such headers..?
>
> Sure, but I fail to see the *gain* with having it. If the contents of the
> header is based on what's already in the email, it doesn't add any new
> information. The bug number is *already* in the message, why copy it?

Uhhh, no, the point here was to assign bug numbers for emails to -bugs
which *don't* go through the bugs form and therefore didn't have the bug
number info in the message.

Doing it for the ones that *did* go through the form might be nice
because it'd add consistency as to where to find the bug number and that
could possibly even be done across replies that might have changed the
Subject line and removed the bug and such.

> > But we can't do that backdated on existing mails. In the archives they're
> > > immutable. So they'd be for new emails only. So I'm not sure it would
> > > actually help very much?
> >
> > We could certainly provide the mapping for old emails even if we don't
> > want to actually change the existing emails (although I'm not entirely
> > convinced it'd be such a bad idea to include the bug numbers somehow..),
> > and, really, we're talking about commits going forward, so is the issue
> > that old emails don't have it actually a problem?  New emails would and
> > the commit log moving forward is much more likely to reference new bugs
> > than old..
>
> Right. I'm not saying we shouldn't provide the mapping for old ones -- we
> definitely should. In fact I've gotten pretty far on the road of
> backfilling that with some tricky regepx (and yes, we have things like
> duplicate bugs with the same bug id and things in the archives -- the kind
> of stuff that happens when you don't actually store things in, say, a
> database).
>
> But that's unrelated to providing an additional custom header to an email
> that already contains that information.

For emails from the bugs form, having the bug number in a header
(instead of just the subject) seems like it could be independently
useful, but the discussion here was about providing a way for bug
numbers to be assigned based on just an inbound email- one that didn't
use the form.