Re: mailing list redirect for bug numbers?

Greetings,

* Magnus Hagander (magnus(at)hagander(dot)net) wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 12:09 PM Dimitri Fontaine <dim(at)tapoueh(dot)org> wrote:
>
> > Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > > With bug numbers, the situation is the same: if, while offline, you have
> > > a commit message carrying a bug number, and an offline mailbox where
> > > pgsql-bugs threads are tagged with the same bug numbers, it's easy to
> > > look up the thread based only on the contents of the commit message. If
> > > you have to contact a web interface to figure out what the thread is,
> > > that workflow fails.
> >
> > Is it possible to add custom email headers in the pglister system,
> > something like maybe X-PostgreSQL-Bug, so that the bug ID number is
> > clearly assigned to emails?

This was exactly what I was thinking too, to avoid the issue with the
Subject field.

> > Such a system might also be backwards compatible when backfilling bug
> > numbers to threads that don't have them yet. Local archives will need to
> > be synced again of course, but then it's easy to grep for the
> > X-PostgreSQL-Bug and find the email thread again, right?
>
> 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..?

> 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..

Thanks!

Stephen