Function attributes [OT]

[Mark Lawrence]

Steve Holden wrote:
> Mark Lawrence wrote:
>> Gabriel Genellina wrote:
>>> En Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:29:12 -0300, Arnaud Delobelle
>>> <arnodel at googlemail.com> escribió:
>>>
>>>> I posted an example of a decorator that does just this in this thread a
>>>> couple of days ago:
>>>>
>>>> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2010-February/1235742.html
>>> Ouch! I didn't see your post, nor several other earlier posts in this
>>> thread. In fact, I thought mine was the *first* reply when I wrote it!
>> It's not just me then.  I'm using Thunderbird on Windows Vista to view
>> the group via gmane, and notice the earlier parts of a thread can show
>> up hours or even days after the later ones.  Would something who
>> understands these things be kind enough to explain why this happens, or
>> at least provide the keywords needed for google, as I haven't got a clue
>> where to start.
>>
> There are two main channels feeding the comp.lang.python newsgroup.
> Gmane is primarily a news (NNTP-based) service, though for reasons best
> know to the organizers they choose to rename the standard newsgroups to
> fit their own idea of how the universe should be organized, so there the
> group becomes gmane.comp.python.general.
> 
> The first feed is the general interchange of articles between NNTP
> servers: while this is usually a reliable interchange mechanism, an
> individual server can "glitch" occasionally (by losing network
> connectivity, for example, or when some part of its news support
> mechanism breaks temporarily).
> 
> The second is the python-list mailing list, maintained as a part of the
> python.org infrastructure (by a hard-working team of volunteers, I
> should add, who get little enough credit for the sterling work they do
> day in day out to keep the real information flowing and the spam out).
> 
> More recently the waters have been muddied by Google Groups, which sadly
> seems at time to be so badly managed (or simply not managed?) as to make
> it a principal source of spam. This surprises me, as Gmail appears to
> have very effective spam filtering. Many people appear to use Google
> Groups as their primary interface to newsgroups and/or mailing lists to
> the extent that they believe the Groups interface to be what everyone
> uses to access the list.
> 
> The task of maintaining a two-way bridge between the comp.lang.python
> NNTP community and the python-list email community while filtering out
> the spam and ensuring that posts aren't duplicated too often is a
> difficult one. For example, I hit "reply all" to your message, and had I
> not trimmed the headers my NNTP client (Thunderbird) would have sent
> copies to you, to the mailing list AND to the newsgroup. Sometimes such
> messages do appear twice, particularly (in my experience) to recipients
> who use the email channel.
> 
> In short, these things happen because life is complicated and the
> technical solutions available to disambiguate the feeds aren't perfect.
> So you might consider filing the glitches under "shit happens". Speaking
> personally I wouldn't have a clue how to keep this stuff going on a
> daily basis at the volume level we see on this group, and I am very
> grateful to everyone who does.
> 
> regards
>  Steve

Many thanks for the explanation.

Kindest regards.

Mark Lawrence