Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] Writing down mail list etiquette.

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 May 2021 10:45:39 +0200

On Tue, May 11 2021, Dave Huseby wrote:

> After violating a few unspoken etiquette rules that were spotted by
> Christian Couder <[email-masked]>, Filipe Contreras
> <[email-masked]> suggested that somebody write a guide.
> Since I was the latest cause of this perenial discussion, I took it upon
> myself to learn from my mistakes and document the fixes.
>
> Thanks to Junio <[email-masked]> for providing links to similar
> discussions in the past and Stefan Moch <[email-masked]> for
> pointing out where the related documentation already existed in the
> tree.

Improvements in this area are most needed, so thanks for working on
this.

We should not have a new file describing this though, we already cover
the content you're adding here partially in
Documentation/SubmittingPatches, and some more in
Documentation/MyFirstContribution.txt (e.g. a passing mention of
in-reply-to etiquette), with this applied we'd have discussion of these
related topics in three places.

I had some rough WIP patches to update Documentation/SubmittingPatches
to address some of what you're adding here, which I've discarded, but I
submitted some related patches just now as [1].

As you can see from that topic we e.g. already have MUA-specific tips in
Documentation/SubmittingPatches, your addition of a section discussing
mutt's config here is another thing we'd be duplicating/unnecessarily
splitting across multiple places.

I do think it's going to be hard to update SubmittingPatches, for
example it has a long section going on about the specific format of
patches to craft for the ML, as if anyone's using anything other than
git-format-patch these days (it was written before that existed/was as
established).

I suspect though that any suggestion to simply remove most/all of that
for simplicity will probably be met with (IMO unwarranted resistance),
which is why I gave up on this the other day before even submitting
patches to the ML.

But regardless of that, the post-image after your patch of having
another place we discuss the same/related topic would be worse, we
really should have one canonical guide, so your patch(es) should be
amending/splitting Documentation/SubmittingPatches, not duplicating it.

1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/