Re: [PATCH 1/3] git-format-patch: Make the second and subsequent mails replies to the first

Petr Baudis [off-list ref] writes:

Dear diary, on Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 09:32:27PM CEST, I got a letter
where Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] said that...

quoted

Josh Triplett [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

..., but you
suggested that you didn't mind having threading as the default.

Did I? ... then that was either a mistake or miscommunication.

I do mind changing the default output.  I do not mind threading
as the default ONLY IF user asks for output with these extra
headers.

What's the big deal? It's not like we didn't change those things in the
past if it doesn't horribly break everything and the new behaviour is
clearly more sensible.

While I agree to the whole three lines, I do not think adding the
Message-Id and In-Reply-To header lines by default is more
sensible at all.

Adding phoney Message-Id to format-patch output makes some sense
only when you are sending messages, and if I recall original
"motive" message correctly only with git-imap-send.  We do not
need this for git-send-email, since it can do its own threading.

Although I've already accepted the series to "next", now after
you brought up the issue, I started to suspect that it might
even make sense not to do this in format-patch but make it a
responsibility for MUA-looking commands instead.

More importantly, format-patch is used to extract patches into
separate files (I do that myself often, and I think Andrew
Morten uses it to extract stuff from git-maintained trees).  In
such a case having phoney Message-Id is simply a waste.  Running
"head -n X 0*.txt" now needs one or two larger X to view the
same information, and fewer patches fit on the screen than
before.  So the new behaviour, if it were not optional, is
clearly less useful for such purpose.

It could even be confusing and inviting mistakes.  When quoting
a change from somebody that was sent in an e-mail to the list,
giving its Message-Id is often helpful to others who want to go
to the source themselves, but if a file that was generated by
format-patch by default carries a phoney Message-Id, it can be
mistakenly used in such a quote.