Should sendemail.confirm default to always?

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

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I was recently having a conversation with some people used to the
GitHub-style Pull Request workflow, who told me that they feel scared of
using git send-email in case they make a mistake and e.g. get the
recipients wrong, since they can't correct it after sending.  They can
resend, but if they do that they'll feel like they're bothering some
very busy people by having sent them the same message twice (regardless
of whether those people are actually bothered by it, it's scary).

This made me remember feeling that same sense of fear when I used
git send-email the first few times.  At some point I discovered that I
could set sendemail.confirm to always, and then git would always prompt
me before sending a message, and I could review the recipients list,
edit the message if I wanted to, etc.  After that, I was happy, and
completely forgot that that wasn't the default behaviour until having
this conversation.

So I thought it was worth asking, might it be a good idea to change the
default, and have git always prompt before sending mail unless it's told
otherwise?  Expert users will be able to figure out how to change this
default if they don't like it, but novice users won't have bad first
experiences where they accidentally send out an email before they were
ready any more.

I don't think this change would cause too much hassle for people
expecting the current default, because the current default is for git to
prompt *sometimes*.  So anybody who doesn't like being prompted is
likely to have already disabled it.

These git users (who are probably in the majority!) are used to having
edit and delete buttons, so for them the idea of having to get things
right the first time is scary enough with a preview, let alone without
one.  I hope you can empathize.

Thanks!

Alyssa Ross

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