[RFC] 'bzr-email' using revision_id for threading

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
| John Arbash Meinel writes:
|
|  > There are certainly things I could do to make them more unique. But
|  > the *point* was to have them such that 2 clients could create
|  > threads for eachother. So that if Robert commits a patch that I
|  > then build upon, you can follow that thread.
|
| Which means what?  Who do you propose be allowed to generate the
| particular *email* message that starts the thread?  Do you want people
| to be able to somehow "join" the thread simply by specifying an
| appropriate Message-ID?  ... You can see how fast this gets messy.
|
| Email message IDs must be unique; this means that a client may throw
| away a message containing a seen ID, or throw an error, or anything --
| behavior is undefined.  If different clients are potentially referring
| to a given revision, but their commentary is significant, then the
| revision reference can't be used as a message ID except in
| combination with uniquifying information.

True, but these are automatically generated emails, without any user
interaction. It is generated by the plugin at commit time.

What *I* want is to be able to read the 'bazaar-commits@' list in threaded mode,
and to see the different branches that are being worked on. So that as Jelmer
does his 20 commits on bzr-svn and Robert is doing 10 on his stacked-branches
work, I can switch on threads and see their commits as separate pieces.

The work I did actually does very good at that. And if the emails are only sent
as part of a post-commit trigger, then we also know that the message ids are
unique. (We'd be in bigger trouble if the revision-ids were not unique than just
having an e-mail message discarded.)

I can understand Robert's concern that if bzr-email is doing this in a
post-commit hook, and then Launchpad wants to do it as a "monitoring these
branches" hook you could run into problems. However, I'm using @bzr-email to
give a namespace where bzr-email can work. Launchpad can use their own.

The bigger problem I see here is if we used the same email for post-push and
post-pull, since then you can have the same objects being replicated to
different locations (and thus duplicate emails sent).

However, for now, it is just post-commit, which ends up working quite well for
what I intended.

|
|  > And you could see which pqm revision the work was done against, etc.
|
| Why not just use X-Bzr-whatever headers?

You could, but at least for me I use Thunderbird. Mostly because it works the
same on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, and I do switch back and forth fairly often.

John
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