freebsd vs. netbsd

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 23:13:10 -0600, @lbutlr wrote:
> On 10 Jun 2020, at 23:06, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> > However, I assume that the use of "reply to all" is so convenient it is often preferred to "reply to mailing list", that's why sometimes replies are send "twice"…

Attention! Here we have a severe case of "MUA ate my homework"!

Your MUA did modify (!) my original message, so the quote is no
longer correct (as it imples something that I didn't write).

Aspect 1 is no big problem: It removed my newlines and put
everything into one long line. This is no big deal with
regular text ("paragraph text"), but would be with code,
or something laid out to be a table or a diagram in text.

Aspect 2, and that _is_ a problem: I wrote "...", which is
three periods, and your MUA turned it into "…", which is
an UTF-8 ellipsis.

Aspect 2a, a sign of inconsistency, is that your MUA did
not change my " double quotation marks (inch symbols) into
correct typographical quotation marks. And how could it?
Which rules would apply? I'm in Germany, so our quotation
marks are "two down" and "two up", while in English, you
usually how "two in" and "two out", something like this,
incorrectly simplified:

	,,The german style.''

	``The english style.''

And there are of course differences in AE and BE. You can
also see that I used tabs and empty lines for format my
reply. If a MUA eats those, big problem.

A typographically skilled person will even say that using
something like “that“ is wrong (uses same symbol for start
and end of quoting).

Similarly, MUAs could mess with the use of dashes ("-" or
"–") or apostrophes ("'" or "’").

All those considerations of course lead to breaking my
carefully crafted message in plain ASCII (not even using
ISO-8859-1) and lifting it into the UTF-8 multibyte universe
with all its unsolved questions. ;-)



> A smart MUA (is there one) you have a reply button that replied sender if the messages was directly to you, replied to list if the message was from a list, [...]

As I mentioned, this will only work as long as the relevant
headers are intact. If some MUA mangles them on the way (yes,
I'm looking at you, MICROS~1 products!), this will no longer
work. And as I've been saying this, MICROS~1 products are
also known for changing message content (see above, aspect 2),
and even mangling timestamps and timezones.

Oh, and MUAs don't have to be smart. It's much better if the
people using them are smart. That's fully sufficient. :-)



> [...] and made you hit a difficult chorded sequence of 47 keys in precise order in less than 4 seconds to reply to all.

Which is inconvenient for users who _wish_ to be CCed in the
typical "reply to all" manner.

If I remember correctly, "reply to all" has never been a real
problem on the FreeBSD mailing lists. Users can set up filtering
rules to remove duplicate messages they might receive during a
thread, or remind their counterparts to pay attention to use
the "reply to mailing list" button.

Sadly, Sylpheed has a prominent "reply to all" button, whereas
"reply to mailing list" is a drop-down element next to the
regular "reply" button. So you can guess which one gets used
the most.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...