on bug status change, show new status in Subject of notifications

Bug #231023 reported by Martin Pitt
10
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

As recently discussed on lp-users@ [1], it would greatly help me to process a lot of bug mail if the subject contained the new status if the status changed. This should include the case when a bug is marked as duplicate, since this happens exceptionally often, and reading through those bug trails is mostly a waste of time.

E. g. this should look like:

  John Mitchell [Bug 219035] [Duplicate] Re: Audacious not launching anymore in Hardy 8.04
  Launchpad Bug Tra [Bug 225989] [Invalid] /etc/sudoers is commented wrong

This should only be done on status *changes*, so if it did not change, the subject shouldn't contain it.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/launchpad-users/2008-May/003703.html

Tags: email lp-bugs
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

If a bug's status is set to different values for different projects at the same time (for example, set to Invalid upstream but Confirmed for Ubuntu), which status should the notification show?

Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote : Re: [Bug 231023] Re: on status change, show new status in Subject:

Matthew Paul Thomas [2008-05-27 9:20 -0000]:
> If a bug's status is set to different values for different projects at
> the same time (for example, set to Invalid upstream but Confirmed for
> Ubuntu), which status should the notification show?

Ah, good point. In this case it does not even matter so much, since I
am usually subscribed to just one project (e. g. to the hal Ubuntu
package). However, a similarly, and more interesting case is if you
have several package tasks and change several at the same time.

Would it be possible to just display status changes in Subject: if it
only changed in one place? That's by far the most common case. More
complex status changes are worth opening the bug mail, since they
happen very seldom.

Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote : Re: on status change, show new status in Subject:

I decline this request. For me, it's easy to do that with different colors in mutt.

Changed in malone:
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Karl Fogel (kfogel) wrote :

Re-opening because we shouldn't let an edge case prevent a generally useful feature from being implemented.

The important thing here is a) to be able to distinguish between bug events where some status changed and bug events (e.g., new comments) where no status changed, and b) to be able to see as much information about the status change as can reasonably be fit into an email subject line. For people who follow bugs mainly by email, this would be a huge convenience.

So, proposed behavior:

  * If a bug affects only one project and the bug's status changes, then the subject of the outgoing email should contain the "[NEW_STATUS]".

  * If a bug affects multiple projects, but the bug's status changes in only one of them, then the subject should contain "[PROJECT:NEW_STATUS]".

  * If a bug affects multiple projects and the bug's status changes in more than one of those projects, but the new status is the same wherever it was changed, then the subject should contain "[NEW_STATUS in...]" (that's a literal ellipsis; the body of the email will contain the details).

  * If a bug affects multiple projects, and the bug's status changes in more than one project, and the new status is not the same, then the subject should say "[STATUS CHANGES...]", and the body of the email will contain the details.

Changed in malone:
status: Invalid → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote :

That sounds like a good compromise; I guess that less than 1 per mille of my bug mail is about multi-project/multi-status changes, and for those it's better to read the entire mail anyway.

I have used the mutt color coding for half a year now, and it made bug mail processing a lot easier. I can immediately delete duplicates and fix released/invalid bugs if they didn't get a followup after closing.

But few people use mutt and even have the liberty of doing that client-side color coding, so those tags in the subject would still be useful. Sure they will block half of the subject from being displayed if they get long, but either it didn't change at all (which is immediately visible from the bug), or in the few cases where it did, you can still open the mail to see it in its entirety.

Thanks, Karl!

Revision history for this message
Karl Fogel (kfogel) wrote :

Adding a note that if we're going to tweak the subject line, we need to make sure that all other possible threading information is preserved (e.g., 'References' header, 'In-reply-to', whatever else), so that thread is preserved despite the Subject tweaks.

Curtis Hovey (sinzui)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
summary: - on status change, show new status in Subject:
+ on bug status change, show new status in Subject of notifications
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