Re: git send-email should not allow 'y' for in-reply-to

On 11 January 2013 08:47, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 09:39:06AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote:

quoted

quoted

Please don't answer "y" when git send email shows the following prompt:

"Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first email?"

you should respond with a message ID there. Unfortunately we have a
growing thread that contains submissions with this mistake.

<snip/>

  People answer 'y' to "Who should the emails appear to be from?"  and
  'n' to "Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first email?"
  for some unknown reason.  While it is possible that your local
  username really is "y" and you are sending the mail to your local
  colleagues, it is possible, and some might even say it is likely,
  that it is a user error.

I have never used Git's email support so this doesn't affect me one
way or another but it seems that checking the results is fixing the
symptoms, not the problem? I apologize if this was already discussed
but I couldn't find such a discussion.

I was wondering if it might be a better idea to change the wording of
the questions if they have proven so confusing? The first time (just
now) that I read "Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first
email?", it clearly seemed like a yes/no question to me. :-)

How about "What Message-ID to use as In-Reply-To for the first email?"
or "Provide the Message-ID to use as In-Reply-To for the first
email:". I'm a little surprised that "Who should the emails appear to
be from?" would be interpreted as a yes/no question but we could
rephrase that similarly as "Provide the name of the email sender:" (I
don't really like this particular version but you get the idea).