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

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <7hfm5d$62ng$1 at midnight.cs.hut.fi>,
Lars Wirzenius  <liw at iki.fi> wrote:
>aahz at netcom.com (Aahz Maruch):
>>
>> 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.
>
>Some latitude, yes, but as little as possible. The history of the net
>knows too many situations where seemingly innocent changes have caused
>trouble later. (For example, one gateway author decided that X- headers
>weren't worth passing through, since they tended to be X-Face and other
>bandwidth killers. Enter Dejanews and suddenlyt X-No-Archive was almost
>vital.)

<sigh>  Yeah.  (Of course, I think X-No-Archive is useless anyway, but I
do agree with your basic point.)

>In my opinion, mucking with References headers is too much. Especially
>since RFC822 specifies References for mail (although not as well as
>RFC1036 does for news, but the definitions aren't contradictory).
>
>IMHO, any mailer that doesn't generate References headers is broken.

Really?  You mean Netscrape got it *right* for once?  Huh.  Who'd a
thunk.  (Remembering a project where I used In-Reply-To for tracking
messages and had to scramble to deal with Netscrape's References.)

Anyway, while I'd normally agree with you about References, in this case
we'll only do it from mail to news and only when References doesn't
exist at all (but In-Reply-To does).  I *think* that's safe; the most
likely worst that can happen is that someone responds to a private
e-mail on the list, creating a "bogus" Message-ID in References.  

(The very worst is that AFAIK e-mail Message-ID's are not required to be
unique WRT netnews Message-ID's, but we still have that potential
problem right now even without copying the headers.  And it might not be
all that bad; I simply don't know how mailers and newsreaders deal with
Message-ID collisions.)

((I'm taking a more-active interest in this than I might normally
because one of my mailing lists recently moved to Mailman and I'm
considering dumping Majordomo at work in favor of Mailman.  I suppose I
should take Barry's advice and sign up for the Mailman list.))
-- 
                      --- Aahz (@netcom.com)

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