Launchpad itself

Suggestions for branch subscription email

Bug #116715 reported by Jonathan Lange
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Fix Released
Medium
Tim Penhey

Bug Description

- The branch title shouldn't be in the subject. The branch is going to keep getting commits and those commits represent new information, not the continuation of a conversation.

- When looking at the email in a list of emails, I should be able to see who did the commit. Some Subversion mailers do this by setting the "From" field to be the committer. (Reply-to is often some mailing list).

- I should also be able to see what the commit is about. Some Subversion mailers do this by setting the subject to be the first line, sentence or 80 chars of the "commit message". In our case, this would be the commit message for the tip revision of the branch.

- If the branch has no title, then we should just display the URL in the signature. Displaying "None" is almost always a bad idea.

- The logs are long, and difficult to read in a variable width, sans serif font. The 'merged', 'branch-nick' and 'message' lines could probably all be removed (the message itself should be preserved, it simply doesn't need to have a label).

Example message here:

"""
From: <email address hidden>
Subject: [Branch ~game-hackers/game/trunk] None

------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 22
committer: Christopher Armstrong <email address hidden>
branch nick: trunk
timestamp: Thu 2007-05-24 20:41:11 -0400
message:
  Merge network-is-awesome

  Authors: radix, exarkun
  Reviewers: radix, exarkun

  Game can now be a client to remote models.
added:
  bin/
  bin/network-client
  ...
  game/ui.py
modified:
  game/__init__.py
  ...
  game/view.py

<log here>
<diff here>

--
None
https://code.launchpad.net/~game-hackers/game/trunk

You received this email because you are subscribed to this branch.
To unsubscribe from this branch use go to https://code.launchpad.net/~game-hackers/game/trunk/+edit-subscription.
"""

Tags: lp-code
Revision history for this message
Tim Penhey (thumper) wrote :

Part of the design of the launchpad branch emails was to mimic the way the bzr-email plugin worked.

So this sends the same type of email.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan Lange (jml) wrote :

So, what are we going to do with this bug?

Changed in launchpad-bazaar:
assignee: nobody → thumper
importance: Undecided → Medium
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Tim Penhey (thumper) wrote :

> The branch title shouldn't be in the subject. The branch is going to keep getting commits and those commits represent new information, not the continuation of a conversation.

This is more a problem with the email threading algorithm your email client is using. Yes gmail is overly enthusiastic in its threading algorithm, but that is not the fault of the thing sending the email.

> When looking at the email in a list of emails, I should be able to see who did the commit. Some Subversion mailers do this by setting the "From" field to be the committer. (Reply-to is often some mailing list).

This I think we can reasonably do.

> I should also be able to see what the commit is about. Some Subversion mailers do this by setting the subject to be the first line, sentence or 80 chars of the "commit message". In our case, this would be the commit message for the tip revision of the branch.

This we could also do. Although we need to decide what. My suggestion would be to use the first line of the commit message truncated to 80 characters.

> If the branch has no title, then we should just display the URL in the signature. Displaying "None" is almost always a bad idea.

Agreed. If we use the commit message then the branch title wouldn't be shown in the subject anyway.

Changed in launchpad-bazaar:
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Tim Penhey (thumper) wrote :

Some bits implemented as part of some email fixes that went in for 1.1.8.

Re-evaluate where we are at with email diffs during 1.1.9 to plan for changes in 1.1.10.

Tim Penhey (thumper)
Changed in launchpad-bazaar:
milestone: 1.1.10 → 1.1.12
Revision history for this message
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu) wrote :

>> I should also be able to see what the commit is about. Some Subversion
>> mailers do this by setting the subject to be the first line, sentence or 80 chars
>> of the "commit message". In our case, this would be the commit message for
>> the tip revision of the branch.

> This we could also do. Although we need to decide what. My suggestion would be
> to use the first line of the commit message truncated to 80 characters.

What about putting the revision number before the message? That would be awesome.

Tim Penhey (thumper)
Changed in launchpad-bazaar:
status: Confirmed → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Tim Penhey (thumper) wrote :

Fixed in RF 5370.

Changed in launchpad-bazaar:
status: In Progress → Fix Committed
Tim Penhey (thumper)
Changed in launchpad-bazaar:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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