On 04/06/2008, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Subject lines are things you put on the top of your email so that the recipient knows what the email is about, when they see it in a list. They are useful.
It's unfortunate then, that the last 10 threads on wikimedia-tech (as sorted by my mail client) had no meaningful subject line.
May I suggest changing the subject when you reply to a mediawiki-cvs post, to something somehow related to the feature or bug in question?
We manage to pick a meaningful commit message when we commit these revisions, so surely there's no reason why we can't pick a meaningful subject when we're talking about them.
Could the automated emails put the commit message (truncated if necessary) as the subject line? Would be more useful than saying what was modified, since as long as someone remembers to update the revision notes, you just get that phase3 was modified and no more detail. Changing subject lines when you reply doesn't help when you use a client that collapses threads to a single line with just the first subject line (such as gmail) - you can't see that the subject line has changed. Either that, or you break the thread, which is equally annoying.