Re: [debian-user] The List Standard
On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 09:10:42PM -0700, David E. Fox wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:01:37 -0600
> Ted Hilts <thilts33@telus.net> wrote:
>
> > First: as I understand your guideline I am not to use the reply key but simply address my reply back to the list and it will be automatically added to the descending list. But have you not in your own email broken the chain of information because all I get when I read your email is to see your one extraction and I don't know
>
> Ted - please wrap your lines at < 72 characters. It'll make your posts
> easier to read and reply to.
>
> Most (sane) mailers track by something called Reference Threading - so
> that a subject with the added text [debian-user] will still be able to
> be seen as part of the thread.
>
> Normally, one should just reply-to list, and it's considered bad form
> to mail the poster directly, unless asked to do so.
>
> > Second: Also, when one person removes content they think is irrelevant but the original author might think otherwise then how does one find that original information?
>
> By using the reference threads, or maybe archives if the original post
> is long gone. That's usually not going to be the case, unless the old
> post is (ahem) old.
>
> All the replies should be visible as one thread that you and others can
> navigate through in order to form the big picture.
>
> >
> > Third: Altering the original content or injecting statements adds more confusion than it saves especially if a lot of people are in disagreement with one another.
>
> Shouldn't happen much. For threads where there is a lot of disagreement
> (see the subjects "sponge burning" for instance) people haven't been
> altering the original content. That would be disastrous, and really
> open one up for a flame fest ;(.
>
Ted,
I've deliberately kept the above in one piece, so you can see how it's
supposed to come out.
The convention is to wrap at 70-72 characters because screens often
have an 80 character limit and your mailer may use >> or some such
to indicate replies and flow of the conversation.
If you want to reply to one point, then it's also quite often
conventional to do something like
<snipped - lots of useful stuff about foo>
Now about $bar - what do you think.
or even
--------- 8X ------ [which looks like scissors on a dotted line]
Now about $bar - what do you think?
It's always worth reading a thread and thinking over a reply carefully:
the convention is to maintain the style such that you can read
consecutively. Once you're part way through a thread, this should be
automatically obvious. So, something like the following:
Ted said in reply to Andy
> $Foo rocks - Linux does infinite loops in five seconds now.
>> Solaris has really good performance now that you can use feature $bar
No, neither of you has noticed that AIX trumps them all with feature
$baz. We're using it here ...
and to try to keep one line at the end to indicate that
>Ted
>> Andy
Foobar
This list is fairly strict about netiquette: the one canonical rule is
that virtually everybody who posts to the list is also subscribed to the
list, so that you don't normally need to cc. them.
If you want to see a very good example of a mailing list with
high signal/noise ratio,technical excellence and lots of interesting
sidelights - the beowulf list (archives of www.beowulf.org) is always
worth a browse. The major players there are real experts - even the
off-topic stuff is interesting and thought provoking.
Andy
>
> > Thanks -- Ted
>
> David E. Fox
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