[bug#64151] [PATCH] etc: Stop making sendemail behave strangely.

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi Ludovic,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> Am Montag, dem 10.07.2023 um 23:21 +0200 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
>>> Hello!
>>> 
>>> It just occurred to me that we might have a reasonable tradeoff at
>>> hand: instead of adding Cc: or X-Debbugs-Cc: headers, we could add,
>>> say, X-Guix-Team: headers.  That way, team members would be free to
>>> filter incoming messages however they want.
>>> 
>>> How does that sound?
>>> 
>>> Of course if team members don’t pay attention to that header, we’re
>>> back to square one, but hopefully that won’t be the case.
>> But how would that header work in practice?  Assuming the mails aren't
>> automatically forwarded, we would need another interface, e.g. mumi to
>> handle it.  Plus, the issue of tagging a single patch in a series would
>> still apply, would it not?
>
> Hi!  The header in itself wouldn’t have any effect: it’s up to
> recipients to configure their email client to filter messages as they
> see fit.  So in that sense it’d be less intrusive.

It could perhaps be used *in addition* to the X-Debbugs-CC headers, but
I don't see it as a replacement, because e.g. for a single patch send
directly to guix-patches@gnu.org, X-Debbugs-CC does the nice thing of
retrieving the bug ID and adding its corresponding email into the
forwarded mail, so that users see which bug the mail was attached to.

> Mumi could also display a tag based on this and let people select only
> issues relevant to a specific team.  That would be an improvement over
> what we have.
>
> Thoughts?

I am still not convinced something deserves to be changed here; the
problems reported so far, unless I'm missing something, were:

1. It's weird that send-email cause people to be CC'd itself
2. It can be confusing when a larger series touches multiple teams

I think 1. mostly results from the initial surprise that send-email now
behaves that way, but I don't see how it's a bad behavior to reach out
to team members automatically.  The process being automated should yield
the same result as if a user called the etc/teams.scm script and placed
the --add-header arguments themselves.

2. Is more of an edge case.  I think if we have a policy of adding a
LGTM *per patch* or 'LGTM for whole the series' it'd solve the immediate
concern.  Having a X-Guix-Team as proposed by Ludo *also* added could
provide a bit more context in doubt.

I'd be interested to hear back from Chris, which originally opened
issue, in light of the above.

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim