launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 28, 2011, at 10:37 AM, Deryck Hodge wrote:

> Hi, Gary.
> 
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:09 PM, Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Deryck and the Yellow squad (especially Graham), could you also doublecheck to make sure you don't think I've misrepresented anything or indicated a problematic direction?
>> 
> 
> I have a couple observations/thoughts after reading this closely.  

Thank you very much!

> But
> first off, thanks for the hard work of putting this together.  It's
> very well thought out.
> 
> == Nice to have vs. Must ==
> 
> I think the "X-Launchpad-Subscription-Description" header idea in the
> "Nice to have" section is actually a requirement.  The former bugs
> team realized in alpha testing that without something like this it
> becomes very difficult to filter mail according to subscription
> filter.

Got it.

> 
> Likewise, we need some plain text equivalent for the rationale -- "You
> received this mail because you are subscribed to Launchpad project
> bugs tagged with lp-foo" -- and this will help Gmail users who can't
> filter based on headers.

I'm not keen on coming up with "human-readable" descriptions of all the possible flags and tags that can be configured.  I think I captured your intent with this change, though (now in "Must"):

 * Email notifications include '''a X-Launchpad-Subscription-Description header''' with the (optional, user-defined) names of the subscriptions that caused the notification to be sent.  They also include the description names in the email body, so that they can be used for filtering by mail clients such as Gmail that do not expose arbitrary headers for filtering.


> == Nice to have (not!) ==
> 
> Were it me, I would be very careful about considering re-enabling
> subscriptions for distributions.  It's a bit simplistic to describe
> the problem as primarily technical vs. social.  They are all wrapped
> up together.
> 
> I would probably state it like this:
> 
> Allowing people to subscribe to all Ubuntu bugs creates lots of problems. :-)
> 
> I realize people want to fix technical issues and leave social issues
> to communities, but in my time on bugs, this was always a source of
> problems.  I fear that if you re-enable this in order to allow
> filtering on the distro at the highest level, you will end up creating
> even more unique opportunities for people to get themselves subscribed
> to a ton of bug mail and not be able to work out what happened.
> 
> I would certainly consider this out of scope since it enlarges the bug
> mail options, rather than reducing noise or providing more control.
> If this story is a great success, then leave it to someone else to
> work out how to add this back in.  Also, I'm not sure anyone is really
> asking for this.  It's only nice, IMHO, in a theoretical sense or for
> technical purity (i.e. you can subscribe to other pillars, so why not
> distros?).

Got it.  I like taking things out of scope.  I have moved it down to "Out of scope" and included your explanation.  (Jono has not re-approved yet, and I'm sure he will express concerns about this move if he has them.)

> Again, other than these two points, this looks well thought out and
> well described.

Awesome.  Thank you again.

Gary