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Feature request: Ability to Fork a reply to a separate thread
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Feature request: Ability to Fork a reply to a separate thread

Feature request: Ability to Fork a reply to a separate thread

(1) By ddevienne on 2023-03-03 10:16:46 [link] [source]

On the SQLite Forum, we often go on tangents from the OP.
(Nothing wrong with that. That's just a statement of fact)

Case in point, Stephan's answer to my postscriptum.

I don't want to reply there, to distract away from the main thread,
since that topic is a very important one.

But OTOH, there's no easy way to fork a thread, from a given message, to another thread.

This has probably been discussed before, right? Any chance this might land soon?

(2) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2023-03-03 10:26:50 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

This has probably been discussed before, right? Any chance this might land soon?

Technically it's not difficult to do and it would tie in nicely with an in-experimentation feature being prototyped for linking forum posts to checkins and tickets. Namely, the forked response would simply not have a parent post but would/could have an automatic link back to the originating thread to retain the continuity.

i don't know about "soon," as i'm currently "between residences" and have other priorities and obligations which limit my hacking time, but i will take this idea on and think this would curtail nicely with my other current forum-related experimentation.

(3) By ravbc on 2023-03-03 12:05:47 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

Well, it has been discussed in the early days of this forum, but as usual there was lack of spare cycles among the most interested (me) to implement it. :-/

Glad to hear that the idea did not die entirely.

(4) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2023-03-03 12:32:06 in reply to 3 [link] [source]

Well, it has been discussed in the early days of this forum, but as usual there was lack of spare cycles among the most interested (me) to implement it. :-/

It's come up several times before but it now just happens to tie in nicely with an idea we've been more or less idly tossing around for a few weeks about creating explicit links between artifacts, e.g.:

  • forum post X links to check-in Y
  • ticket X links to forum post Y
  • more generally: artifact X links to/references artifact Y

We have the infrastructure to be able to do this in a manner which does not require any incompatible changes, but we have to be certain to "get it right" when we do it because we're going to be stuck with it once it's in place. We have multiple viable approaches and we now need to figure out (first via spitballing/bikeshedding, then experimentation/trial and error) which approach is going to give us the most bang (and least grief) for the development/maintenance/CPU cycles.

If we have the ability to fork a response into a new thread, we're going to want the ability to automatically provide a link in the form "this post was split off from thread X," so that the user doing the splitting does not have to type in "this post was split off from thread X..." in the free-form text field.

Once we get the details of how best to model those links (within fossil's existing data model), we'll have that piece and can implement split-off threads to make use of it. The actual thread-splitting is technically a much simpler thing to do (i dare say trivial - it's really just a slight adjustment of the current "reply" feature), but without that link back to the original post, context would disappear, so i'd much rather have the linking system in place before implementing the thread-splitting.

(5) By ravbc on 2023-03-03 12:53:24 in reply to 4 [source]

i'd much rather have the linking system in place before implementing the thread-splitting.

My original idea was much more shallow (just place an automatically generated post at the beginning of new thread and at the place of fork in the old thread), but threads relationship properly embedded in fossils data model, are worth to wait for.

Thank you for working on it.

(6) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2023-03-03 13:09:52 in reply to 5 [link] [source]

(just place an automatically generated post at the beginning of new thread and at the place of fork in the old thread)

Placing a link at the point of the fork hadn't occurred to me but is a good idea. That's the kind of detail we need to ensure that we can efficiently deal with in the final model of how we link things.

In summary: cross-artifact linking is something we want to implement for various uses beyond thread-splitting but thread-splitting is a particularly nice use case for it so will provide a good feature to develop alongside it. Exactly when it will materialize is currently anyone's guess, due to interference from Real Lifeā„¢, but it is near the top of my current fossil TODOs.

(7) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2023-03-13 13:08:45 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

But OTOH, there's no easy way to fork a thread, from a given message, to another thread.

An RFE ticket has been opened so that this doesn't get lost: src:/info/2cc5acf3ba27e3e46252dbdcb63438152324da34