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On Tue, Jan 14, 2020, at 3:41 AM, Sorin Sbarnea wrote:
> I kinda find the default gerrit message subjects quite not practical 
> for narrow screens (not only mobile).
> 
> The information is stacked with too much repetitive boilerplate at the 
> start. Most of the time only very few letters from the interesting part 
> (like change name) are visible.
> 
> Am I the only one observing this? 
> 
> Does it make sense to look into changing the templates to make them 
> more compact?

https://review.opendev.org/Documentation/config-mail.html Docs for changing the templates.

> 
> Few observations:
> - "Change in" is mostly boilerplate, I would be happy to use a bried 
> suffix like `x: ` or an emoji but that may be controversial

We should avoid emoji as people may consume email in their terminal and readability shouldn't be dependent on special font glyphs.

> - Project name with organization suffix, how often do we have same 
> project under two different orgs?

With zuul configs we have a bit more chance of name collisions as some patterns are emerging. "project-config" and "base-jobs" in particular I expect will collide over time.

> - Is master really needed? I would rather avoid mentioning it for 
> master or even avoiding it completely if not possible to hide it for 
> master only
> - Advanced filtering of messages can be done using message headers, 
> nobody forces us to rely on subject line alone

I don't think Gerrit's email templating system allows us to edit headers. Looking at an email from Gerrit today the only headers it seems to set are X-Gerrit-Change-Id, X-Gerrit-ChangeURL, and X-Gerrit-Commit. I think keeping the branch info in the subject is important as a result.

> - Even the message content could use some improvements, mainly about 
> making it more compact
> 
> What do you think?

I think we should get switched over to the container based Gerrit deployment before we try to make changes like this. This will help keep the container transition simpler as we won't have to double account changes to templates in multiple places.

Personally I don't use Gerrit email too much so I'll have to defer to those that do. Whatever changes we make should be communicated as people will likely need to update their existing filter rules. And we shouldn't remove information as that may prevent updating those rules to something that works.

> 
> https://sbarnea.com/ss/Screen-Shot-2020-01-14-11-27-32.png (example screenshot)