Subject line

Ruby
41

Hi,

Am Mittwoch, 05. Sep 2007, 07:51:24 +0900 schrieb Chad P.:

Then, of course, you should remove it by hand every time you
hit the “Reply” button. I don’t recommend it.

I’m not accusing you of behaving in that manner – I just
found this a handy place to mention it, because you commented on the
discourteous practice of changing subject lines to conflict with list
policy.

That’s what I meant. I agree changing subject lines is no
good practice at all.

Anyway, sometimes you have to do weird things. A customer
complained because I always remove the most of the quoted
and pre-quoted text. So he has to search his whole mailbox
for all the previous mails it refers to. He obiously never
heard anything of neither mail filtering nor does his mail
client feature threaded views. It doesn’t even send
In-Reply-To headers.

Bertram

42

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 08:12:40AM +0900, Bertram S. wrote:

Anyway, sometimes you have to do weird things. A customer
complained because I always remove the most of the quoted
and pre-quoted text. So he has to search his whole mailbox
for all the previous mails it refers to. He obiously never
heard anything of neither mail filtering nor does his mail
client feature threaded views. It doesn’t even send
In-Reply-To headers.

All that searching shouldn’t really be necessary, as long as you keep
enough quoted text to provide context – unless someone suffers from
some
kind of memory-related disability, of course.

43

On Sep 4, 3:47 pm, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:

http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-talk-google?hl=en

Maybe because some of us like our MUAs. That was a fairly insensitive,
even offensive, answer. I hope you only meant that as a joke.

Why would you ever take offense to such a statement? Dude, I think
maybe you’re a little too close to your MUA.

T.

44

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Chad P. wrote:

Any time you tell someone to completely change the tools (s)he uses,
you’re essentially telling him/her that his/her preferences don’t matter.
That’s why.

Ah, but this happens in the corporate world all the time. Because half
of any professional job (or more) is inter-personal communication, not
all of everyone’s preferences can matter.

But the good side of that is that sometimes the only way to get
something done in a finite time is to bring in a new tool.
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Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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45

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 08:54:22AM +0900, Trans wrote:

Why not save yourself all that grief and use

http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-talk-google?hl=en

Maybe because some of us like our MUAs. That was a fairly insensitive,
even offensive, answer. I hope you only meant that as a joke.

Why would you ever take offense to such a statement? Dude, I think
maybe you’re a little too close to your MUA.

Any time you tell someone to completely change the tools (s)he uses,
you’re essentially telling him/her that his/her preferences don’t
matter.
That’s why.

46

Any time you tell someone to completely change the tools (s)he uses,
you’re essentially telling him/her that his/her preferences don’t matter.
That’s why.

What if they don’t? I suppose MUAs which cannot handle this stuff
automatically are
pretty rare breed nowadays. There’s is nothing wrong with using them,
but it is wrong
to force something needed because of shortcomings (ok, it’s not a
shortcoming, it’s
“feature”) of your preferred MUA on everyone else.

Gmail can handle headers without the need to spam subject lines, so can
Mail on OS X, Thunderbird, and I am sure plenty of other mainstream
MUAs.
If someone loves his MUA he will have to love its deficiencies to,
that’s what
love is about, isn’t it?

BTW, changing tools from time to time can be a very good idea.
Especially if the
change is for the more capable tool. There may be some productivity
loss at first
(but not in MUAs case, I must say), but you are better off in a long
run.

My preference is not to have redundant marking in the subject line.
And I prefer not to have fixes that fix stuff for 10% and breaks it for
the 90%.

Do my preferences matter?

My vote: “nay”.

Regards,
Rimantas

47

On Sep 4, 4:56 pm, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:

Any time you tell someone to completely change the tools (s)he uses,
you’re essentially telling him/her that his/her preferences don’t matter.
That’s why.

No. First of all, that assumes I had foreknowledge that you had
already tried the google-groups interface. Have you? Secondly telling
you that a different tool moots an issue you’re having, has nothing to
do with discounting your preferences. Lastly, preferences change.
That’s what happened to me. While, I still miss some things about my
KMail client, the benefits of the web interface out-weight the loss.

So I’m not dissing you. I’m just offering up an possible alternative.

You seem to be a bit upset because so many people have disagreed with
you. Yes? I know that feeling. Often times however I eventually
discover there is a fair reason for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if
your MUA has a means of doing what you want in a different way --you
just haven’t discovered it yet. (Hmmm… maybe I missed it… What MUA
was it, btw?)

T.

48

This is tiring already.
Ultimately, it’s the decision of the list maintainer.
Either way some will like it, some won’t like it.
Let’s all just promise ourselves to deal with it by adapting to how
it is or how it becomes. If that means having a messy list to read,
or changing your mail / news reader agent or just eating the
unpleasant, so be it.
Let’s get back to more critical matters.

My final take is that the added characters do add up to a lot more
packet traffic when you consider the size of the membership.
Clearly it’s an easy/lazy solution to add the characters for some
people’s client software.
For others it’s an increase in the signal to noise ratio.

If it’s added, I expect some Rubyists to immediately make a title
muncher to bite off the parts they don’t like.
If it’s not added, I expect the other Rubyists to immediately make a
title prepender to add the parts they want.

49

From: “Bill K.” [email protected]

sort-by-subject. (Note: The message id is still contained in
the header. I presume you were referring to the one in the
subject specifically.)

BTW, to clarify: I wouldn’t want to hold back progress just
because my MUA sucks. If enough people find the message-count-
in-the-subject useful, i’d concede the sort-by-subject breakage
is my problem for using an MUA that can’t do proper threading.
(Something I could change.)

On a related note, was wondering if it would work to append the
message-count ID to the end of the subject? Or would that get
problematic on all the Re:'s ? (I guess this also comes back to
information that might need to be stripped between the usenet
and forums gateways, so…)

Regards,

Bill

50

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 12:16:30PM +0900, John J. wrote:

If it’s added, I expect some Rubyists to immediately make a title
muncher to bite off the parts they don’t like.
If it’s not added, I expect the other Rubyists to immediately make a
title prepender to add the parts they want.

I like to think the Ruby community is, in general, courteous enough to
not saddle each other with unexpected changes to subject line
conventions
like that – no matter which decision the list maintainer makes.

51

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 09:28:44AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

all of everyone’s preferences can matter.
I didn’t realize ruby-talk was a corporation. Thanks for clearing that
up.

Last I checked, the list maintainer wasn’t paying me for participation
(and I’d probably be fired anyway if he was).

52

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 10:12:53AM +0900, Rimantas L. wrote:

“feature”) of your preferred MUA on everyone else.
Um . . . it wasn’t suggested that we should try to accomodate the
majority of MUAs, which probably all have certain general classes of
features. Instead, it was suggested that everyone use a specific MUA
to avoid “grief”, if I recall the phrasing correctly. Regardless, I for
one actually use an MUA that has excellent threading and sorting
capabilities, on a platform that allows me to do additional sorting and
munging using external tools (mutt on FreeBSD), so that obviously isn’t
the reason I tend to lean toward wanting a visual marker for this list.

My reason is that I want ruby-talk traffic in my main inbox, and I want
to sort by thread, but I want to be able to discern ruby-talk (and other
list traffic) at a glance. One of the big reasons for this is to be
able
to more quickly ascertain whether a particular message is spam that has
managed to slip through or a badly titled list message – but that’s
only
one reason.

You’re apparently assuming that everyone who has different preferences
from you is:

  1. a luddite with an underfeatured MUA

  2. stubbornly unwilling to sort the “right” way

  3. trying to make up for personal shortcomings by changing the way the
    list is managed

. . . which is kind of a shitty attitude about your fellow list members.

Gmail can handle headers without the need to spam subject lines, so can
Mail on OS X, Thunderbird, and I am sure plenty of other mainstream MUAs.
If someone loves his MUA he will have to love its deficiencies to, that’s what
love is about, isn’t it?

So can mutt, which I’m using. My preference for visible list markers
has
nothing to do with that, and I don’t know where you got the idea that
anyone that wants to be able to identify the source of a given message
at
a glance without giving up other identifying information must be using
the mail command and sed as his MUA.

BTW, changing tools from time to time can be a very good idea. Especially if the
change is for the more capable tool. There may be some productivity
loss at first
(but not in MUAs case, I must say), but you are better off in a long run.

“Change is good, so use what I do.” That’s not very helpful.

My preference is not to have redundant marking in the subject line.
And I prefer not to have fixes that fix stuff for 10% and breaks it for the 90%.

You’re overstating the case.

Do my preferences matter?

Sure. So does your piss-poor attitude about the preferences of others.

53

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 11:45:33AM +0900, Trans wrote:

That’s what happened to me. While, I still miss some things about my
KMail client, the benefits of the web interface out-weight the loss.

You’ve got that backwards. Your statement assumes that others haven’t
tried it, and furthermore assumes that they can and must try it to be
one of the cool kids like you.

I find that the dubious benefits of a web interface are almost totally
eclipsed by the benefits of an interface over which I have far greater
control, especially since the benefits you seem to want me to “enjoy”
are
benefits I already do enjoy, unrelated to the reasons I actually would
prefer a visible marker in my inbox view indicating the list source of
messages.

So I’m not dissing you. I’m just offering up an possible alternative.

The suggestion was poorly presented, and carried a mildly insulting tone
across to at least this reader. You may not have intended offense, but
if that’s the case, you’ve failed to express yourself clearly.

You seem to be a bit upset because so many people have disagreed with
you. Yes? I know that feeling. Often times however I eventually
discover there is a fair reason for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if
your MUA has a means of doing what you want in a different way --you
just haven’t discovered it yet. (Hmmm… maybe I missed it… What MUA
was it, btw?)

No. I’m not upset because people disagreed. Disagree all you like.
What bothers me is the “everyone who disagrees with me is a luddite, an
obstinate fool, or a bastard” attitude that seems to prevail.

The combination of my MUA and my OS environment provides at least two
opportunities for doing what I want:

  1. I can use the list-subscribe capability of mutt to identify the
    list. Doing this, unfortunately, obscures the original source of the
    message so that I can’t tell who sent it to the list until I open it.
    I’m using this now – but the jury’s still out on whether that’s an
    improvement, since it interferes with my ability to associate names
    with personalities easily when I’m participating in mailing list
    activity.

  2. I can munge the subject line before it hits my inbox using tools
    available to me as a FreeBSD user – tools including Ruby, procmail,
    Perl, and other options. This would suit me perfectly, but because
    I
    tend to be more courteous than that, I won’t take that approach. I’m
    sure you’d all love to see every message I send to the list suddenly
    start appearing with [Rb] at the beginning of the subject line. Also,
    the fact I can do this doesn’t address the preferences of others who
    may be using more crippled MUAs and OS platforms.

To answer directly: I’m using mutt as my MUA, and I’ve discovered means
of doing exactly what I’d like to be done with the subject line, but
there’s always a trade-off.

54

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 11:07:37PM +0900, James Edward G. II wrote:

On Sep 5, 2007, at 8:58 AM, Chad P. wrote:

. . . which is kind of a shitty attitude about your fellow list
members.

You have easily been the most abusive member of this thread.

My “abusiveness” has been limited to pointing out where others are
insulting or dismissive. If you find that “abusive”, perhaps you need
to
examine how you attract such responses. Keep in mind that you’re not a
woman being accused of bringing rape on herself: you’re talking about
people claiming that anyone that wants [RUBY] at the beginning of list
mail subjects is technologically backward, foolish, or an asshole being
“abused” for that behavior.

55

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 10:58:52PM +0900, Chad P. wrote:

My reason is that I want ruby-talk traffic in my main inbox, and I want
to sort by thread, but I want to be able to discern ruby-talk (and other
list traffic) at a glance.

Since you use Mutt, have you tried this? Type l (lowercase L), then:

~N ~h ruby-talk

Or just drop the ~N and then you get all ruby-talk, regardless of
status. I’m sure you can use some other header to discern other lists.

FWIW, I vote no on the subject prefix. IMO, it’s a redundant piece of
information.

56

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 11:56:13PM +0900, Brandon M. Browning wrote:

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 10:58:52PM +0900, Chad P. wrote:

My reason is that I want ruby-talk traffic in my main inbox, and I want
to sort by thread, but I want to be able to discern ruby-talk (and other
list traffic) at a glance.

Since you use Mutt, have you tried this? Type l (lowercase L), then:

~N ~h ruby-talk

Not lately. Thanks for the reminder.

For those who are reading this and decide they want to try out the limit
command in mutt, it’s probably important to mention that hitting
again (that’s the ‘L’ key, with no other keys) followed by
without any parameters, will “undo” the view limit. I try to make it a
policy to always explain how to undo something whenever I explain how to
do it, as that can be the most important piece of information
(especially
when failing to undo a mistake can effectively prevent asking for more
help, as in the case of dealing with an MUA).

At the moment, I’m having a hard time remembering why the limit command
wasn’t the complete solution to the problem for me. I’ll probably find
myself annoyingly prevented from doing something in about two or three
weeks, but since ruby-talk supports list replies without using mutt’s
subscription capabilities I may “unsubscribe” in the client (not from
the
list itself) and use the limit command to get what I want for a while.
I’ll at least do so until I again run across whatever annoyance it was
that caused me to subscribe in my .muttrc in the first place.

57

You’re apparently assuming that everyone who has different preferences
from you is:

Not having different preferences, but trying to force them on others.

  1. a luddite with an underfeatured MUA
    Wrong.
  1. stubbornly unwilling to sort the “right” way
    Wrong.
  1. trying to make up for personal shortcomings by changing the way the
    list is managed
    Right.

. . . which is kind of a shitty attitude about your fellow list members.
Not about all members.

So can mutt, which I’m using. My preference for visible list markers has
nothing to do with that, and I don’t know where you got the idea that
anyone that wants to be able to identify the source of a given message at
a glance without giving up other identifying information must be using
the mail command and sed as his MUA.

In Gmail I see the message source at a glance because it puts
“ruby-talk” label on it.

BTW, changing tools from time to time can be a very good idea. Especially if the
change is for the more capable tool. There may be some productivity
loss at first
(but not in MUAs case, I must say), but you are better off in a long run.

“Change is good, so use what I do.” That’s not very helpful.

It was “more capable tool” not “what I do”.

Sure. So does your piss-poor attitude about the preferences of others.
Not others. Yours.

I won’t ask you to put [Chad P.] into the subject line so I in the
future
I can deal with your abusive messages in a way I prefer, luckily my
MUA can do that
without much trouble already.

As I already voted with “nay” there is no need for me to participate
in this thread any more, especially in nonconstructive way like this.

Regards,
Rimantas

58

On Sep 5, 2007, at 8:58 AM, Chad P. wrote:

. . . which is kind of a shitty attitude about your fellow list
members.

You have easily been the most abusive member of this thread.

James Edward G. II

59

Chad P. wrote:

Not lately. Thanks for the reminder.

For those who are reading this and decide they want to try out the limit
command in mutt, it’s probably important to mention that hitting
again (that’s the ‘L’ key, with no other keys) followed by
without any parameters, will “undo” the view limit. I try to make it a
policy to always explain how to undo something whenever I explain how to
do it, as that can be the most important piece of information (especially
when failing to undo a mistake can effectively prevent asking for more
help, as in the case of dealing with an MUA).

additionally, ( and you may already be using it ) something like
color index red black “~h ruby-talk”
in .muttrc may be of use

I’ve not used this much myself but it looks pretty powerful…

http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-3.html#ss3.7
http://boktor.net/files/conf/mutt/color.header

60

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 05:04:26AM +0900, Rimantas L. wrote:

You’re apparently assuming that everyone who has different preferences
from you is:

Not having different preferences, but trying to force them on others.

So who’s trying to force preferences on others? From what I can see,
you’re aiming in that direction. I’m not – if you don’t like my
preferences, you can add your vote to the ballot box, same as me.
Telling me that I should change my MUA because your preferences are
better than mine, however, is trying to force preferences on others.

  1. a luddite with an underfeatured MUA
    Wrong.

Answering only part of a complete statement doesn’t make you right.

  1. stubbornly unwilling to sort the “right” way
    Wrong.

See above.

  1. trying to make up for personal shortcomings by changing the way the
    list is managed
    Right.

There. The statement is finished. Thus, it as a whole described you
accurately.

. . . which is kind of a shitty attitude about your fellow list members.
Not about all members.

So . . . as long as you only have a shitty attitude about some list
members, you still have a good attitude. Is that it?

So can mutt, which I’m using. My preference for visible list markers has
nothing to do with that, and I don’t know where you got the idea that
anyone that wants to be able to identify the source of a given message at
a glance without giving up other identifying information must be using
the mail command and sed as his MUA.

In Gmail I see the message source at a glance because it puts
“ruby-talk” label on it.

Good for you. Kindly stick your sense of superiority somewhere I don’t
have to see it.

BTW, changing tools from time to time can be a very good idea. Especially if the
change is for the more capable tool. There may be some productivity
loss at first
(but not in MUAs case, I must say), but you are better off in a long run.

“Change is good, so use what I do.” That’s not very helpful.

It was “more capable tool” not “what I do”.

In many ways, the web interface for gmail is far less capable than what
I’m already using.

Sure. So does your piss-poor attitude about the preferences of others.
Not others. Yours.

I am one of “others”. I’m not the only person with preferences other
than yours.

I won’t ask you to put [Chad P.] into the subject line so I in the future
I can deal with your abusive messages in a way I prefer, luckily my
MUA can do that
without much trouble already.

As I already voted with “nay” there is no need for me to participate
in this thread any more, especially in nonconstructive way like this.

It might have helped if you didn’t join the discussion in such a
destructive manner, then.