Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2019 09:35:05 -0500
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>,
	Dimitri Fontaine <dim@tapoueh.org>,
	Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>,
	Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>,
	"Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz@postgresql.org>,
	PostgreSQL WWW <pgsql-www@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: mailing list redirect for bug numbers?
Message-ID: <20190118143505.GN2528@tamriel.snowman.net>
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Greetings,

* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
> > On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 7:28 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrot=
e:
> >> Uhhh, no, the point here was to assign bug numbers for emails to -bugs
> >> which *don't* go through the bugs form and therefore didn't have the b=
ug
> >> number info in the message.
>=20
> > Without having the ability to properly merge bugs and to structured cro=
ss
> > referencing and such, I think that's a really bad idea. That's going to
> > cause more problems than it's fixing.
>=20
> Agreed.  If we have bug numbers assigned to messages that aren't bugs,

We *already* have bug numbers regularly assigned to messages that aren't
bugs because they're non-bugs that come through the bugs form, and I
can't say that I see it being a serious issue, and there really isn't
anything we're going to be able to do to deal with it anyway, no matter
what we do.

> or are replies to bugs, it's just going to be a mess.

In my suggestion, replies to bugs that are sent by a sensible MUA would
have the bug # of the bug being replied to- in exactly the same way that
our archives have a mapping from message IDs to thread IDs internally
and that's how we get the threading in the archives.

My suggestion would just mean that a thread like this:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/2047094.V130LYfLq4%40station53.o=
usa.org

would get a bug ID assigned to it, and that bug ID would show up in a
'X-Pg-BugId' field and you'd be able to have a link to the thread like
this:

https://postgr.es/b/123456

Another idea along this same vein would be to provide a way for the
thread IDs that we already assign to be available as a link and then
include that thread ID as an extra header.

Now, Magnus brought up a reasonable concern that making pgLister have to
figure out the threading would add a bunch of stuff into it that
currently lives in the archives instead (which is independent), and
that's a pretty good point, so, here's a different idea- we could just
assign an ID to every message that comes through pgLister from some
sequence (or maybe a sequence per mailing list..) and then provide a
mapping from that ID to the message in the archives.

In other words, we'd add a header like:

   X-PG-MessageId: 123453

And then be able to use links like:

https://postgr.es/p/pgsql-hackers/123453

This would work across lists, not require much from pglister, and be
able to be searched in an offline manner through local archives.

So, this seems to help with "we want a shorter URL to put into the
commit log that we can also search through offline email archives" but
it doesn't solve the "we want a bug #" (or, at least, it doesn't solve
it any more than the current system does).

I'm left wondering what the bug #'s use really is though.  We use it in
some places to refer to a particular report that came in, but we
regularly use message-IDs and URLs too because we have lots of things
that come in via -general or -hackers or directly to -bugs without going
through the bugs form.

Just to wrap this up, what I'm trying to get at is that I'd rather we
try to solve for the specific issue that came up rather than building a
solution on something that's already only a partial answer to begin
with, in that we often want to link from the commits to discussions on
-hackers or to emails to -bugs that didn't have a bug # and those aren't
addressed with this particular approach.

Thanks!

Stephen

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