freebsd vs. netbsd
Valeri Galtsev
galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu
Thu Jun 11 13:42:56 UTC 2020
On 6/11/20 12:56 AM, Polytropon wrote:
> 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.
I agree with your points, Polytropon. I would just add one more that
sets me off: the footer of the message with legalese saying something
like it is confidential, destined to intended recipients only, and
attempting to oblige me to whatever they attempt to put as restrictions.
In the first place, you are too late buddy, you first should ask if I
give my consent for your sending that and agree to obey your restrictions.
Anyway, I have seen these rarely, and not recently, luckily people seem
to come to their senses and stopped using mail servers that do add that
garbage where this will not be appropriate.
Valeri
>
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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