Starting a new thread as the last one sort of dried up and didn’t quite form anything actionable.
Being subscribed to many of our mailing-lists and most recently looking into every project, dev-lists when reviewing board reports, I have seen many of our lists literally being rendered useless. Useless, because it’s almost impossible to follow these lists, as a large percentage of the emails are: * Generated emails and the way they are currently generated makes it impossible for email clients to correctly display them as threads. * Contain so much redundant information, that the actual start of the header that I’m interested in reading is usually not readable on mobile phones. * Most discussions have been moved away from the lists (notifications@, commits@), having left over only skeletons in which every now and then a vote is being handled. My proposal is to change the default settings for auto-generated GitHub emails for all projects (not just the new ones) to be a much more condensed version. With these changes, all existing lists, that haven’t manually configured the format of the emails, instantly get readable lists again. Some would argue that there might be projects that could object these changes, but I would on the other hand bet that more projects would be in favor of such a change than not. Those who don’t want a change, can simply go back to the old format, by specifying it in one commit for which we can even provide a default .asf.yaml snippet. Some people expressed the wish to have longer prefixes, such as “[ISSUE]”, “[PULL-REQUEST]” or “[DISCUSSION]” however do these not add much information to the email that “[I]”, “[PR]” and “[D]” don’t and the shorter version allows displaying more of the subject on mobile email clients. Here’s an example of a project list before the changes: https://lists.apache.org/list?d...@streampipes.apache.org:dfr=2023-1-9|dto=2023-1-15 Here’s an example of the same list after using the other defaults: https://lists.apache.org/list?d...@streampipes.apache.org:dfr=2023-6-12|dto=2023-6-18 Here’s an example on how even ponymail is now able to display something happening on GitHub as a discussion you can also follow nicely via email: https://lists.apache.org/thread/rnr9tjx9rsnqc7b5nwcf68qnp5bkr9hc I would propose to keep the repository as part of the templates, even if since my PR last week was merged it’s now possible to omit that too. I care deeply about our projects, and I would really hate to see our core principles being lost more and more (“If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen”). You would make me really happy if I could get some general approval by you folks here. Chris
