Re: [RFC PATCH 2/4] doc: gitbreaking-changes: replace msg-ids with URLs

On Sun, Oct 4, 2026, at 04:31, Junio C Hamano wrote:

"Kristoffer Haugsbakk" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

[snip]

With that I get a regular `href` and a `mailto` href.

    <div class="paragraph"><p>cf. <a href="https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqa59i45wc.fsf@gitster.g/ (local)">&lt;<a href="mailto:xmqqa59i45wc.fsf@gitster.g">xmqqa59i45wc.fsf@gitster.g</a>&gt;^</a></p></div>

The `mailto` wins and prepares to send an email.

Ouch.

Our primary goal is to give readers ready access to the messages we
refer to.  With that mailto glitch, it would be unusable, so let's
scrap the idea of using the Message-ID as the link text for the link
that leads to the lore archive, unless we can tell Asciidoctor to do
what we want.  Quite honestly, I did not know Asciidoctor was that
broken.

Surprised I was not.

Also, if readers do not recognize "Message-ID used as link text" as
clickable links, that also defeats the purpose.

The secondary goal of my suggestion was to avoid repeating the
disaster we faced after gmane stopped offering HTTP access to its
archive.  We ended up with a bunch of references like $gmane/217 to
refer to their article numbers in our historical commit log
messages, and of course, once we could no longer rely on them, we
had no way of knowing what message article 217 referred to [*].  The
URL to the lore archive does contain an encoded Message-ID, so the
situation is much better than that of gmane from long ago.

Yes, I find it frustrating to read Gmane-era list messages.

But now these references are already forever in the Git history. So even
if I end up obfuscating them with a URL encoding, it will be clear from
the history... for those who go to the trouble of looking.

But see later in this message about how to retain the original msg-ids.

However,
if you live in an environment where it is easier to feed the
Message-ID directly to your e-mail program or newsreader than having
to visit the web and then come back to your e-mail environment to
continue your work, having a readily cut-and-pasteable Message-ID
that is not encoded as part of a URL is definitely superior to
having the lore URL alone.

Yeah I suspected that email-only users would have such a slick
setup. Thanks for explaining.

But the important point is that this was a secondary goal.  If the
format using Message-IDs as link texts to go to the lore archive does
not work (either because we cannot bypass the mailto behavior, or
because readers would not recognize that Message-IDs are clickable
links), I am perfectly fine with leaving only the HTTP link that
is so obviously a URL (even though I find them rather ugly, but
I am not the primary target audience).

What if we used footnotes for all of the original msg-ids?

    <URL>[1]

    [...]

    [1]: <msg-id>

Or maybe just for the ones that need URL encoding? I personally think it
would be better to use them for all if we go for this approach.

[snip]