Python mailing list vs. References: (was Re: My quarterly question on Design by Contract in Python...)

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <7hf69q$5h10$1 at midnight.cs.hut.fi>,
Lars Wirzenius  <liw at iki.fi> wrote:
>aahz at netcom.com (Aahz Maruch):
>>
>> Okay, so the Mailman software should copy In-Reply-To: to References: if
>> References: does not exist.  That seems like a simple patch.
>
>Er, I think copying essentially random headers to other headers is
>a bad idea. Mailman should leave the headers as untouched as possible.
>Not even to placate stupid broken mailers that can't thread properly. :)
>
>(I've already written a threading engine for my mailer that uses
>In-Reply-To if there is no References header. It's trivial.)

Again, we're not talking about mailers here, we're talking about
newsreaders.  A mail-to-news gateway certainly should have a certain
amount of latitude in changing headers to fit the different
environments.

(If necessary, I'll write a longer post about the differences between
e-mail lists and newsgroups, but I'll assume it's just a bit of
confusion until I'm informed otherwise.)
-- 
                      --- Aahz (@netcom.com)

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