[Mailman-Users] Re: remove this?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 5/8/01 4:27 PM, "J C Lawrence" <claw at kanga.nu> wrote:

>> IMO, the List-* headers are excessive and should, at the very
>> least, be configurable.
> 
> This has been a point of contention on the list and elsewhere.  I
> disagree.

I'll take a middle ground. If he really feels this is how the list-* headers
ought to operate, he should write a patch to mailman and submit it to Barry
via sourcefourge. Barry can then decide whether to include it, either as
default behavior or as some configurable option or external hack/patch.

Or if you really feel strongly about it, go find a more compatible MLM.

This issue comes up again and again, and I apologize in advance if I sound
(or sounded) grumpy about this -- but some of us have put a lot of time and
energy into studying these issues, and after a while, it gets tiring to hear
people come in who haven't HEARD of the RFCs, much less studied them, coming
in and telling us how we have to do things. And then complaining at us when
we disagree.

If you want to hack your copy of Mailman to send out headers identifying you
as the Queen of England, be my guest. But nobody is under any obligation to
make that easy, to help you do it, or to give you instructions.

Same with hacking list-*. The general consensus among those of us who've put
time into understanding this issue is that it's a very good thing for the
long-term development of mail list technologies. Short term, it's at best a
minor irritant, and that's only to people with cruddy mail clients (consider
it an incentive to upgrade to soemthing decent).

You're welcome to disagree -- but not demand that we help you do something
we think is wrong/stupid/shortsighted, and definitely not that we have to do
it your way, when you can't even tell us why it's done this way in the first
place... 

And I apologize (sort of) for ranting, but since I do this stuff for a
living, and I put a lot of time into trying to figure this stuff out, I get
a little grumpy when people wander in telling me how things ought to work
when they've never been under the hood of a piece of email...

>> If I want my list message to carry this info I can already put it
>> in the footers. 
> 
> Which is arguably quite offensive as it clutters the body of the
> message with repetitive noise rather than being safely and largely
> invisibly tucked away in the headers (invisibly until
> accessed/required)..

Actually, I'm in the camp of putting at least some of it in the footer TOO,
except in digests, where it needs to be in the preamble/header. I've got
some interesting (but unpublishable) research on location vs. usage vs.
message size... 

But it's good go give them at least some hint in the message itself, since
they (a) won't read instructions, (b) the list-* RFC isn't well implemented,
and <C> the folks who most need that info are least likely to know to look
in the headers. Implementing list-* is investing in future technologies;
footer data is managing today's users.