Re: [PATCH 1/2] Provide a common malloc wrappers and palloc et al. emulation for frontend'ish environs

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 2013-01-09 13:34:12 +0100, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> Am I the only one who finds this way of posting patches really annoying?
>
> Well, I unsurprisingly don't ;)

Yeah, that's not surprising :)

>> Here is a patch with no description other than a list of changed
>> files. And discussion happens in a completely different email.
>
> They contain the commit message - which in most of the cases is more
> informative than the one just posted, which was definitely rather
> short. It should like in e.g.
> http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/1352942234-3953-11-git-send-email-andres%402ndquadrant.com

They are really two different issues - the posting a patch without a
description, and the separation of threads. It's when they are
combined together that it becomes *really* annoying :) When it'sposted
as a separate email *with* a better commit message it's at least
easier to start a discussion off it. But I still find it much omre
annoying than just posting the patch in-thread.

>> What's wrong with just posting the patch as a regular attachment(s) to
>> a regular thread, like other people do?
>
> Two issues:
> - If you have a bigger series of patches (like the whole logical
> decoding thing) posting all patches in a single mail makes the
> following thread even harder to follow than its currently the
> case. Note how even in this, far smaller, case the discussion actually
> happened in the appropriate subthreads. I find it way much easier to
> reread through an old thread that way to reassure myself what was
> discussed.

Yes. So one thread per patch. That's what you already have. That's not
a factor of how the patches are posted, that's just a factor of how
many threads you break it up in. I can agree that posting 20 different
patches inthe same thread is even worse :)

> - mhonarc does really strange things if you attach two git created
> patches (splits them into multiple mails)

mhonarc does a lot of strange things. But this part is actually not
mhonarc's fault - it's majordomo that writes them into an mbox file in
a format that you can't see the difference between the patch and the
different message. Heck, it quite often gets it wrong even if you just
post *one* patch when it's generated by git.

This is handled better by the new archives code.

>> It may be just me. But it may be others as well, so I figured I should
>> raise the issue :)
>
> I am happy to comply with whatever others prefer.

Yeah, so far it's also just my opinion in the other direction :)
Hopefully, some others will have thoughts about it too.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/