On 08/05/2018 11:35:26 AM Sun, Peter Bloomfield wrote: …
A new GitLab issue[0] has been opened to continue the discussion, and a new branch (thread-date) has a modified sort algorithm, with threads sorted by the date of the most recent message in the thread (its 'thread-date'). Testing and comments welcome!
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[0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/balsa/issues/4
Replying to myself, to keep the nesting from exploding☺
I take it as a consensus that thread-date-sorting should be implemented--right?
Questions:
1. Should it replace head-date-sorting, or be a preference item (defaulting to thread-date)?
2. Should we add an option to *not* gather threads by subject?
3. Do we need simple threading?
AFAICT these are independent decisons.
Background on question 2: threading ('JWZ threading', but just 'threading' if we drop 'simple') first uses
the 'References' and 'In-Reply-To' headers to construct threads. These depend on messages having a
'Message-ID' header, which seems to be universal, but still not mandatory (as of RFC 5322). To allow for the
possibility that some message in the thread did not have a msg-id, or that some mailer did not use it to
create a 'References' header, JWZ's algorithm then merges ('gathers') threads that have matching 'Subject'
headers. The downside of the strategy is that unrelated messages with common subjects like 'New bug' or
'Question about the test' get threaded together.
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