Re: mailing list redirect for bug numbers?

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 4:42 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:

> 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..?
>

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?

> 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.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>