On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 08:36:47AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > On Tue, 24 Oct 2023 10:25:06 +0300 Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > > I've refrained from replying to this thread so far, as it seemed to be a > > caricature of a bikeshedding discussion, but for what it's worth, I > > often find myself in the opposite situation when I'm annoyed that > > someone trimmed too much of the discussion in their replies. > > After hitting "page down" 3 or 4 times and seeing only quoted text, I then > stop and just ignore the email. Yes, there's been emails I purposely > ignored because of this that had asked me to respond near the end. Oh well. > Then they ask, "why didn't you respond?" pointing out the email I was to > respond to. And I would reply, "I never saw the request because of too much > quoted text". > > > Yes, replying to a 3000-lines patches with a full quote ana d a > > Reviewed-by tag at the very bottom, without any other comment, is > > annoying. On the other hand, trimming everything but the few lines to > > which you reply means that it gets much more annoying to jump in the > > discussion in the middle of a mail thread. There's a difference between > > trimming unrelated parts, and removing related content that happens not > > to be the direct subject of a particular reply. > > I just replied to an email yesterday that cut too much off, and I had to > make a note about that, and put things back in. > > What's worse, is if you are having a technical debate with someone, and > they trim out everything that might go against their argument, but leave > anything that supports their argument. I've seen that happen quite a bit. > > I should write a book called "The art of trimming". ;-) Maybe a good path forward would be to start by flagging extreme cases only, without being too pedantic ? That assumes we can agree what an extreme case is. One thing I found helpful in replies is to add tags just after the commit message (where the tag will appear when it gets applied), or after the last comment if I need to comment on something specific. The recipient will know that they don't need to scroll down after the tag. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart
