Re: lilypond-user Digest, Vol 120, Issue 37

[David Kastrup]

Patrick or Cynthia Karl <address@hidden> writes:

>> Message: 7
>> Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2012 18:56:35 -0800 (PST)
>> From: soundsfromsound <address@hidden>
>> To: address@hidden
>> Subject: Re: lilypond-user Digest, Vol 120, Issue 36
>> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>> 
>> I replied to this:
>> 
>> Optional-args-in-event-function-not-working-with-2-17-6-td136044.html#a136046
>> <http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/Optional-args-in-event-function-not-working-with-2-17-6-td136044.html#a136046>
>> 
>
> OK, I'm going to try one more time and then give up.  Is there any
> possibility you could follow the usual usenet etiquette and quote the
> message you are responding to.  Not in that one message.  In general.

I think you are both a bit off here.  The LilyPond user mailing list is
_not_ Usenet.  It is available for reading using NNTP from Gmane, and
mirrored on a number of web interfaces, but just like "Internet" refers
to a globally routed uniquely assigned IP number space (and partly a DNS
namespace), Usenet refers to a globally assigned pool of newsgroup
hierarchies which this mailing list is not part of.

So "Usenet etiquette" does not apply here, even though most of it makes
excellent sense and transfers perfectly well.

Now the first thing to note here is that soundsfromsound was replying to
a mailing list digest.  For several reasons, it makes sense treating a
digest (unless one's mail tool offers specific manners of dealing with a
digest by splitting it into individual messages, like Gnus does with C-d
IIRC) as read-only and not reply to the digest at all rather than
getting the individual message to reply to.  That has several reasons:

a) "quote the message you are responding to", interpreted naively, will
quote the whole digest.  Which, among other things, will let the whole
quoted digest appear as part of the next digest.  It is obvious that
this is not sustainable.

b) Message headers in both mail as well as NNTP reflect the history of a
thread, making it possible to add missing parts of context for the
reader.  Both mail and web interfaces interpret "threading" of messages
according to those headers, and the headers of a digest are not helpful
for that.

Now it turns out that quoting what one is replying to in full is also
not desirable.  Instead, one should trim the original to just the
relevant, explicitly referenced parts and reply to those individually.

I have checked our information in <URL:http://lilypond.org/contact> as
well as the list info at our list server: neither contain a reference to
netiquette, whether mailing list etiquette or Usenet etiquette.

So for better or worse, first time participants can't be reasonably
expected to know the fine points of how to move about on our mailing
lists.  So there is no point in making a spectacle out of telling them.

All the best,

-- 
David Kastrup