[oak perl] to reply or not to reply

[Belden Lyman]

If you don't like rants, don't read this.

I use a threaded e-mail client. That means that my mail boxes
just show the top-level message in an e-mail thread. There's
a little widget I can click on that expands the top message into
the entire thread. You might check whether your e-mail client
supports threads; they're a handy way of visually organizing your
messages.

Within the headers of each e-mail, there are some chingaderas
that show the message's history; if this message is a reply to
the other message, then this message will have that other message's
identifier in it. Threaded e-mail clients work by figuring out
which messages are replies to which other messages, and thereby
builds the threads.

So, replying to messages actually has a different effect than
starting a new message. When you really mean to reply, then
replying is really handy for threaded e-mail clients, eg:

     Subject: [oak-perl] Perl books?
     |
     |-Subject: Re: [oak-perl] Perl books?
     | |
     | |-Subject: Re: Re: [oak-perl] Perl books?
     | `-Subject: Re: Re: [oak-perl] Perl books?
     |
     |-Subject: Re: [oak-perl] Perl books?
     |-Subject: Re: [oak-perl] Perl books?
     `-Subject: Re: [oak-perl] Perl books?

However, sometimes people will just get lazy, and instead of
typing a new message to the Oakland list, they'll just reply
to an old, unrelated message - editing out all the old message
body. So stuff like this occassionally pops up in my client:

     Subject: [oak-perl] one-liner
     |
     `-Subject: Re: [oak-perl] one-liner
       |-Subject: [oak-perl] I have an urgent question
       | |-Subject: Re: [oak-perl] I have an urgent question
       | | |-Subject: Re: Re: [oak-perl] I have an urgent question
       | | `-Subject: Re: Re: [oak-perl] I have an urgent question
       | `-Subject: Re: [oak-perl] I have an urgent question
       `-Subject: Re: Re: [oak-perl] one-liner?

See, the whole "I have an urgent question" thread gets sucked into
the "one-liner" thread. Really, the "urgent question" thread should
appear as a top-level thread of its own. What makes this worse is
when the "one-liner" thread is several days old, and the "urgent
question" thread suddenly pops in: I might not be reading the "one-
liner" thread any more, so might miss out on your urgent question.

Now, in addition to my mail client being threaded, so are the Oakland
list archives. This means that replies-that-are-not-truly-replies-but-
are-in-fact-new-messages get buried in the archives when you view them
in threaded mode.

So please humor this mailing list scrooge by asking yourself: is what
I'm about to send really a reply? Or is it a whole new topic altogether?
If it's a new topic, consider starting a new message rather than
replying to an old one.

Thanks-

Mr. Bah-Humbug