Re: git send-email should not allow 'y' for in-reply-to

[Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com>]

On 11 January 2013 08:47, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 09:39:06AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote:
>
>> > Please don't answer "y" when git send email shows the following prompt:
>> >
>> > "Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first email?"
>> >
>> > you should respond with a message ID there. Unfortunately we have a
>> > growing thread that contains submissions with this mistake.

<snip/>

>   People answer 'y' to "Who should the emails appear to be from?"  and
>   'n' to "Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first email?"
>   for some unknown reason.  While it is possible that your local
>   username really is "y" and you are sending the mail to your local
>   colleagues, it is possible, and some might even say it is likely,
>   that it is a user error.

I have never used Git's email support so this doesn't affect me one
way or another but it seems that checking the results is fixing the
symptoms, not the problem? I apologize if this was already discussed
but I couldn't find such a discussion.

I was wondering if it might be a better idea to change the wording of
the questions if they have proven so confusing? The first time (just
now) that I read "Message-ID to be used as In-Reply-To for the first
email?", it clearly seemed like a yes/no question to me. :-)

How about "What Message-ID to use as In-Reply-To for the first email?"
or "Provide the Message-ID to use as In-Reply-To for the first
email:". I'm a little surprised that "Who should the emails appear to
be from?" would be interpreted as a yes/no question but we could
rephrase that similarly as "Provide the name of the email sender:" (I
don't really like this particular version but you get the idea).