[U-Boot] [PATCH 00/28] u-boot next: a generic approach for nios2 arch

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Scott Wood,

In message <4BA3C8F8.5090804 at freescale.com> you wrote:
>
> And I'm not entirely sure how you're proposing that a mail client 
> *should* deal with such a thread.  It's a tradeoff between displaying 
> less of the subject text, or breaking the display of the thread 
> structure earlier.  Either one is going to be worse for certain inputs 
> -- and given that in an actual discussion the subject doesn't often 
> change, I'd rather see more of the thread structure.

I'm not an expert in the design of MUAs, nor in user interfaces in
general. I'm using an ancient MUA myself, which has far fromperfect
threading capabilities, and usually I don;t even use a threaded
display. But when reviewing patch series, I definitely want to see the
threads of a series (and the replies to these postings) properly
threaded, which includes the correct sequence of the patches. That
means that patch N+1 must be marked as successor of patch N.

The thread information may also be essential for any automatic tools
that try to process such a thread series.

> Even when they don't go off the right edge, chained patchsets are hard 
> on the eyes IMHO.  It's semantically a list, not a (fully unbalanced) 
> tree.  I'm used to lists going straight down, not diagonally.

Agreed.

But then, for the MUA there is probably no way to decide which
message is the next message in the list (that should not get
indented), and which is a follow-up to one of the the messages so it
_should_ get indented. AFAICT mail headers don't carry that type of
information.

But "--no-chain-reply-to" means you have NO list of messages at all -
just all messages hanging under the first one, without any
before-after references.  To me, this is les order and thus much
worse.

> > To me it makes perfect sense that a patch series is threaded - some
> > people forget to number the patches, and quite often patch arrive out
> > of order. It is much easier to have these threded correctly.
> 
> So why not insist on people numbering their patches rather than creating 
> a huge reply-to chain?

I think we should have _both_. People sometimes forget something - if
you have both threading and numbering you still can reconstruct the
intended sequence.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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