Meaning and purpose of the Subject field (was: Ignore error with non-zero exit status)

[Ian Kelly]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 4:24 PM, Jon Ribbens
<jon+usenet at unequivocal.co.uk> wrote:
> On 2015-12-21, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> The whole purpose of the change of subject is to indicate in a human-visible
>> way that the subject of the thread has changed, i.e. that it is a new
>> thread derived from the old one. If that breaks threading, oh well, it
>> breaks threading.
>
> That sounds a bit confused - if the *intention* of changing the
> subject line is to create a new thread, then breaking the thread
> is not "breaking threading" ;-)
>
>>> And, yes, fixing the mail clients of "everybody else in the world"
>>> might be a lovely idea but it is a little impractical to implement.
>>
>> Less impractical than insisting that "everybody else in the world" must
>> change their posting habits to suit those using broken mail clients.
>
> Fortunately I haven't suggested that.

Yes, I only requested that people not change the subject headers for
trivial reasons, by which I meant things like fixing typos (as in the
subject header change that brought about this thread). I also only
intended my request in the context of this forum, which is shared
between Usenet and mailing list users. Changing the subject header to
indicate a change in subject is, of course, fine.