Laurent Lyaudet <[email protected]> writes:
> Le lun. 21 sept. 2026 à 21:38, Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> a écrit :
>>
>> On 21/09/2026 18:33, Laurent Lyaudet wrote:
>> > Le lun. 21 sept. 2026 à 15:16, Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> a écrit
>> > :
>> >>
>> >> I noticed OOMs and swap thrashing with tests/od/big-w.sh
>> >> when preparing the coreutils 9.12 release recently.
>> >> The attached patchset should improve this significantly.
>> >>
>> >> cheers,
>> >> Padraig
>> >>
>> >>
>> > Hello Padraig,
>> >
>> > It seems you forgot to attach the patchset.
>>
>> Oops I mean't the patchset following in the thread.
>> I've now pushed these changes which you can see at:
>>
>> https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/compare/cecd945aa...6bfc90019
>> cheers,
>> Padraig
> Ah. I'm glad I made this remark then,
> because I may learn something:
> - I had your first email and the 4 patches email sorted differently in
> distinct parts of my mail box,
> - but I do see here
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2026-09/threads.html
> that all 5 emails are in the same thread,
> - whilst I don't see the common part in the subject or the body of the email
> that makes this "same thread" analysis possible.
>
> Do you know how it is possible that the first email is put in the same
> thread that the 4 after it?
> Which data is used by the thread detection algorithm in this case, please?
I'm not sure what email client you use, so I can't give specific advice.
However, they all (as far as I can tell) provide a way to see email
headers. If you are using the Gmail web client, it should be a button
with three dots at the top right, followed by "Show source".
If you look at his first email, the headers will have the following:
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
And since it is not a reply, it will be missing the "In-Reply-To"
header.
If you look at his second email, it will contain the following headers:
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
Note that the "Message-ID" for each of his emails is unique. And each
message sets the "In-Reply-To" header to the previous message in the
thread. That is, "[PATCH 2/4]" sets it's "In-Reply-To" to "[PATCH 1/4]",
"[PATCH 3/4]" sets it's "In-Reply-To" to "[PATCH 3/4]", and so on.
That is how the lists.gnu.org preserves the ordering. Other mail clients
choose to determine threads by the subject. This doesn't work well on
mailing lists where the subject changes as the discussion moves to
different topics. Or when dealing with patches from 'git-send-email'.
I notice that Gmail's web UI threads based on the subject and puts them
in a weird order, as mentioned. So I suspect you are using that. I'm not
sure if you can change it there, but I would suggest downloading a
dedicated mail client. You will likely find it easier to track threads
if you subscribe to mailing lists.
Thunderbird [1] is very popular and seems friendlier than alternatives
that might be in a terminal with hotkeys you are not comfortable with.
E.g., I use Gnus [2], which will likely be confusing unless you already
use Emacs. If you decide to use Thunderbird, you might find this
documentation from the Linux Kernel helpful [3]. It describes how to use
plaintext mail instead of HTML, which some mailing lists will reject.
Hope that explination helps, and wasn't too long. :)
Collin
[1] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/
[2] https://www.gnus.org/
[3]
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/process/email-clients.html#thunderbird-gui
