On Wednesday July 2 2008 20:26:49 Hartmut Figge wrote:
And of course I'm using it to just read messages/discussions from
forum users.
The gateway is not essential in doing so.
Well, it is for me. I have very-very slow outgoing connection (1-2 KiB/s)
with fast ingoing connection (1-2 MiB/s). Yeah, approximately 1000 times
difference. So single large files can be downloaded fast but downloading a
large number of small files is painfully slow - including forum pages.
And even with fast connection forum is much less convenient for me than
mailing list anyway.
However, I want to help forum users and the gateway makes this possible.
Let's not forget whole point of this gateway. Its primary purpose - to
help users find one place to ask questions, so everybody who want to help
can do so in one place too. This simplify many things a lot.
It is this 'one place' that causes problems. There is a good reason for
the forum to exist and it should surely continue to exist.
There are people who want to help at the forum. A good thing. But they
should do so after subscribing to the forum.
What do you mean by "subscribing"? I'm subscribed to the forum via gateway
and also registered on the forum as moderator. However, no gateway means no
subscription (only web interface of the forum). Which isn't option for me and
other people who want to help users but don't want or cannot use web
interface (forum).
No linebreak after about 72 chars.
Hard to read. Very hard. And replying with citing requires manually
rewrapping of the text. At least with my SeamMonkey.
Well, I don't have such problem. Everything looks great for me in KMail.
Perhaps you can fix this in your Options?
BTW, this looks like very easy thing to fix. Just preprocess messages with
fmt before finally sending them to the mailing list. If the gateway have
option to preprocess its output with standard commands before sending - this
might be quick and proper solution to fix the problem. If not - it shouldn't
be hard to implement this simple feature. BTW, is there a bug report for this
problem?
However, most of e-mail clients should display messages from the forum
properly.
Yes, I understand why they can't improve gateway: they either aren't
programmers or don't have enough time/motivation.
Improving the gateway could help with the references, but not with
proper quoting or avoiding endless lines.
Why not? "Endless lines" aren't problem for good e-mail client and this can
be fixed easily in the gateway as I suggested.
And why should forum people do so? For the forum it is perfectly
appropriate.
Well, I never don't do wrapping by hand either when I'm writing something. My
client does it for me (but I can turn this feature off; BTW I receive often
messages from people who don't use automatic wrapping in their client or
web-interface).
For compatibility with clients which can't do the wrapping automatically we
may want to preprocess messages from gateway with fmt as I suggested above.
Therefore only proper solution to the problem is to fix the bug.
Yes. By closing the gateway.
No. Only by *fixing* it, not by breaking everything else severely. If you
don't have motivation to do so or don't have enough knowledge that doesn't
make breaking one thing *severely* to fix one or few *cosmetic* problems
right thing.
Similarly I can tell you: "Throw away stupid e-mail client which can't wrap
messages for you and can't put them in one thread automatically when
necessary". Or: "File a bug report with developers of your e-mail client".
BTW, technically these two solutions would be much less harmful than breaking
the gateway. But I don't say such things because this is rude and not
respectful. If you for some reason don't like the gateway and don't care
enough to fix it (or don't like to help newbies) - you still should respect
others who like it and use it "as is".
And remember - *most* users use the forum. It would be disaster if people who
want to help them via mailing list will not be able to do so. Just look in
the archives for a lot of examples where user from mailing list helps user
from the forum. And users from the forum are helping users from the mailing
list too.
Wine Project have good policy about bugs: no matter what the problem is -
only acceptable solution is to fix it without improper hacks or severe
breakages somewhere else (remember bug with OpenGL child windows - its very
good example). Yes, sometimes it may took some time and may be somewhat
annoying but things are fixed properly in the end.
You said yourself that "the right thing is threading by references". This
makes everything else "wrong thing" (especially effectively destroying all
messages from the forum for mailing list users): only proper solution is to
fix the code so gateway can do "the right thing".
In this particular case we just lack a developer who has enough motivation to
fix one or two cosmetic problems in the gateway. So someone should either
become one or hire one; if not - just wait.
