Getting the right root mail of the thread

[Jani Nikula]

On Sun, 03 Nov 2013, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Jani Nikula <jani at nikula.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, 02 Nov 2013, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 7:50 AM, Jani Nikula <jani at nikula.org> wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 02 Nov 2013, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> I think there should be a way to get the root mail of a thread,
>>>>> irrespective of the search order.
>>>>
>>>> Largely agreed. It's just that nobody's gotten around to doing this
>>>> yet. At the cli level I think the consensus is that the structured
>>>> (sexp/json) output format should contain multiple (or all) subjects.
>>>
>>> What about the default? (--format=text). What about user-interfaces
>>> that must display a summary of a thread?
>>
>> To be honest, we haven't had much interest in adding new content or
>> features to the text output formats. It's just much easier to do this in
>> a backwards compatible way in the structured output formats, for which
>> we also have the format versioning. The emacs ui uses the sexp format
>> for the thread summaries.
>
> How is this any better?
>
> (:thread "000000000000826a" :timestamp 1383396519 :date_relative
> "Yest. 06:48" :matched 45 :total 45 :authors "Felipe Contreras"
> :subject "[PATCH/TEST 44/44] request-pull: rewrite to C" :tags ("sent"
> "to-me"))

I made no claims it would contain more or better information *now*. But
if someone were to add new things, the structured output is where it
would likely be added. We could add :subject_first, :subject_oldest, or
whatever *in addition* to :subject.

BR,
Jani.