Cover letter for emailed merge proposal silently discarded

[Andrew Bennetts]

I submitted <https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~spiv/bzr/stacking-friendly-revision-history-verb/+merge/7443> via email. The original email sent from my laptop is attached.

As you can see from the original email, there's a lengthy "cover letter" in that email explaining the patch. Yet there is no sign of that text on the web page for that proposal, or in the email I received from Launchpad informing me that merge proposal was created.

I expected the text of the original email to be visible on the merge proposal, perhaps as the first "comment".

I certainly don't want filing merge proposals to be a multi-step process involving a web form; I regularly create them while off-line. As best I can tell the current process is "send request; wait a minute or five for email to reach LP and be processed; find web page for new merge proposal somehow; open that page; add cover letter to that page; submit". I want the process to be simply "run 'bzr send'", as it is for Bundle Buggy.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

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Andrew Bennetts wrote:

> As you can see from the original email, there's a lengthy "cover letter"
> in that email explaining the patch. Yet there is no sign of that text
> on the web page for that proposal, or in the email I received from
> Launchpad informing me that merge proposal was created.

That is indeed a bug. It doesn't happen to everyone, so it's been
unclear what the root cause is. Thanks for attaching the raw mail.
That will help.

> I expected the text of the original email to be visible on the merge
> proposal, perhaps as the first "comment".

That's what usually happens.

> As best I
> can tell the current process is "send request; wait a minute or five for
> email to reach LP and be processed; find web page for new merge proposal
> somehow;

That's a little worrying. When you create a merge proposal, you should
receive email about it, and that should include the URL.

Aaron
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[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

This appears to be OOPS-1262CMP, which is a decode error handling 0xe2, which occurs in your message as part of the UTF-8 encoding of \u0201, a closing quotation mark.

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

Thanks for grabbing this Aaron.

There is another bug relating to this which is about the script not sending
error email. Perhaps that could be fixed too while you are in that area of
code.

[Andrew Bennetts (spiv)]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> Andrew Bennetts wrote:
>
> > As you can see from the original email, there's a lengthy "cover letter"
> > in that email explaining the patch. Yet there is no sign of that text
> > on the web page for that proposal, or in the email I received from
> > Launchpad informing me that merge proposal was created.
>
> That is indeed a bug. It doesn't happen to everyone, so it's been
> unclear what the root cause is. Thanks for attaching the raw mail.
> That will help.

Ah good. The lack of any error notification gave me the wrong impression.

[...]
> > As best I
> > can tell the current process is "send request; wait a minute or five for
> > email to reach LP and be processed; find web page for new merge proposal
> > somehow;
>
> That's a little worrying. When you create a merge proposal, you should
> receive email about it, and that should include the URL.

Well, I did receive that email. “find web page” was intentionally vague; it's a
toss up really whether repeatedly syncing my new mail or polling the
+activereviews page is going to be faster, but I suspect polling +activereviews
would win.

Obviously if this bug is fixed then that won't matter :)