107580 - "New" bugmail should sort by subject above other bugmail

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Bugzilla :: Email Notifications, defect, P4)

Description

[benc]

Right now, if you sort by subject, the bugmail arrives and the "New" message is
often at the bottom of the pile. This is because the subject of the often starts
with a letter before "N", which means it looks like this:

[bug 111] a bad view
[bug 111] New: a bad view

If we modified the "new:" string to have have a leading character that is early
in the sort order, like <SPACE> + "New:".

Possible problems:
hopefully sort order is not different among various mail programs.

Or, someone could figure out why threading is not reliable in Mozilla mail.

Comment 1

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

"*" or something might be a better character to use than space.

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Changing default owner of Email Notifications component to JayPee, a.k.a.
J. Paul Reed ([e-mail]).  Jake will be offline for a few months.

Comment 3

[benc]

My perl is limited, but it looks like there is a single string for this:

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/webtools/bugzilla/processmail#802

All I really want is to add a single character into that string.

What is the general process, in comparison to mozilla, for getting something fixed?

Comment 4

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

Supposedly this component is frozen pending checkins for bug 124174 and bug 84876. 

After 84876 goes in, that message will be a template, so you'd bug myk (in the
mozilla.org product) about it.

Probably not the answer you wanted to hear, but...

Comment 5

[benc]

I'm going to try to patch and test on kerz's personal instance.

J. Paul: I talked to myk about this today, so I'm good. Hopefully I'll have a
patch soon.

Comment 6

[benc]

The change works, should I take ownership, and create a patch?

(more importantly, should I be working on that copy of the file in CVS, or is
there another file that should be changed?)

Comment 7

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

Mmm... you'll probably want to talk to justdave or myk about this, but I would
say: don't bother; if you can get myk to batch bmo, then great, but bug 84876
will change how this is done, and for that reason, I'd recommend leaving it
assigned to me and bugging me about it (or reassinging to yourself with the
understanding that your patch won't work post-84876).

Also note that after bug 124174, there is no processmail (as such) anymore.

We're getting pretty close on 124174, it seems.

Comment 8

[benc]

myk: this is the bug I was talking about.

Comment 9

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Ben: if you have a patch, please attach it and take over the bug.  Then we can
decide whether it should go in first (and have bug 84876 take it into account)
or wait until after that bug gets resolved.  And, if the latter, then I can
decide whether to apply to b.m.o in the meantime (f.e. when I do the upgrade in
about a month).

Comment 10

[Jacob Steenhagen]

What you probably want is bug 31314 which would allow threading to work at least
to an acceptable range.

Comment 11

[benc]

Not really. I don't use threaded mail views.

I want the things to sort in chronological order, by subject.

Comment 12

[benc]

Everything has moved. Can someone help me? Find the right file?

All I wanted was to change whatever created the "new" subject line in bugmail from:

"New"

 to 

" New" or "-New"

Comment 13

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

Assuming you're on the trunk, I think you want Bugzilla/BugMail.pm... probably
somewhere around line 849.

Comment 14

[benc]

That is the line. I want to change:

$substs{"neworchanged"} = $isnew ? 'New: ' : '';

$substs{"neworchanged"} = $isnew ? ' New: ' : '';

Comment 15

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

Ok... well, I'll note this for when we fix bug 84876; that's the proper way to
address this problem, specifically via the templates we'll create to fix that bug.

In the meantime, if this is something you want fixed on bmo, please talk to Myk
about it; fixing it in the trunk wouldn't help anyway (I don't know when bmo is
planning to upgrade to the trunk--if at all--before the 2.18 RCs).

Comment 16

[benc]

Attachment: patches file

myk: here it is, as promised...

I don't care what the specfiic sorting character is, so we could haggle about
that in a secondary bug, but please, I really need bugmail to arrive in order
now, more than ever.

Comment 17

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Comment on attachment 126561 [details] [diff] [review]
patches file

r=myk

Comment 18

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

-> patch author

Breaking dependency since the fact this is getting checked in negates it.  We'll
just have to make sure bug 84876 takes this into account.  This will do for the
mean time though.

Comment 19

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I hate seeing approved patches sit around for a week without getting checked in ;)

Checking in Bugzilla/BugMail.pm;
/cvsroot/mozilla/webtools/bugzilla/Bugzilla/BugMail.pm,v  <--  BugMail.pm
new revision: 1.6; previous revision: 1.5
done

Comment 20

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I'm sure Ben and I won't be the only ones to appreciate this, so I've applied
this one-character patch to b.m.o (which still has processmail, by the way :)

Myk: if you feel I've overstepped on this, it's pathetically easy to back it out :)

Comment 21

[benc]

VERIFIED/fixed:

You can't believe how much better life is today.

I can actually hit sort by subject, and like, the bugmail actually is displayed
in the order of the bug changes!

Comment 22

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

FYI, this broke bzbot's new bug reporting on IRC, but I don't care, because the
subject sorting in my mailbox is much cleaner and bzbot was easy to fix :)

Comment 23

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

OK, do we want to use a different character than space, for maximum compatibility?

Eudora treats \s+ (regexp) as a single space for sorting purposes, so the extra
space is useless.  "+" instead of a space works just fine, however.

Comment 24

[benc]

Sure. Eudora users are my friend.

"+" sounds good to me, but I'd like someone to get some tests from people.

I'll do Mac OS X (Mail.app).

Comment 25

[benc]

I also noticed a while ago, that AOL mail client does not seem to sort the space.

"+" seems to work okay for Mac OS X 10.2's mail.app.

I have no idea what other people use for email, but being the a QA person, I'd
like to get some reports before making yet another change.

Comment 26

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

All 2.18 bugs that haven't been touched in over 60 days and aren't flagged as
blockers are getting pushed out to 2.20

Comment 27

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Hrm... this bug has been REOPENED for a while. Are we going to actually do this
change?

Comment 28

[benc]

RESOLVED/FIXED:
This has worked for some time, I don't care about the other mailers, if someone
does, they can file a new bug.