[Wine] Bug 13517: Forums breaking mailing list

[Hartmut Figge]

L. Rahyen:

>	Well, I'm using mailing list but also I'm using ML <-> Forum gateway 
>(obviously). Without this gateway, I will not be able to answer to forum 
>users at all [...]

Mhm, you could subscribe to the forum and continue to help there.

>And of course I'm using it to just read messages/discussions from
>forum users.

The gateway is not essential in doing so. ;)

>	Let's not forget whole point of this gateway. Its primary purpose - to help 
>users find one place to ask questions, so everybody who want to help can do 
>so in one place too. This simplify many things a lot.
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^
It is this 'one place' that causes problems. There is a good reason for
the forum to exist and it should surely continue to exist.

There are people who want to help at the forum. A good thing. But they
should do so after subscribing to the forum. Currently the mailing list
gets hurt seriously.

>	In my opinion *only* problem we have with gateway it is the fact that gateway 
>doesn't set In-Reply-To header perfectly [...]

The main problems are missing references, which destroys threading,
missing quotings and these endless lines. No linebreak after about 72 chars.

Hard to read. Very hard. And replying with citing requires manually
rewrapping of the text. At least with my SeamMonkey.

And i do not see any hope for this issue, because these endless lines
are well suited for the forum. But for the ML? ARGL.

>but to me this looks like very minor problem - at least in KMail I
>haven't any trouble understanding replies from forum users (all their
>replies looks like reply to the first post in a thread but it's easy
>to understand proper order if sorting by date is enabled).

Threading by subject is possible, but causes other problems. The right
thing is threading by references. And if there is no reference, then
replies will pop up in a new thread.

Examples are <1214874838.m2f.8997 at forum.winehq.org> and
<1214871100.m2f.8992 at forum.winehq.org>

>Of course threads doesn't look perfectly with not perfectly set
>In-Reply-To headers but I think it is too much to say that this minor
>bug is "breaking mailing list".

It is one of the problems but not the only one.

>Yes, I understand why they can't improve gateway: they either aren't
>programmers or don't have enough time/motivation.

Improving the gateway could help with the references, but not with
proper quoting or avoiding endless lines. And why should forum people do
so? For the forum it is perfectly appropriate. *g*

[...]
>Therefore only proper solution to the problem is to fix the bug.

Yes. By closing the gateway. :-P

Hartmut