On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 10:12:53AM +0900, Rimantas Liubertas wrote:
> > Any time you tell someone to completely change the tools (s)he uses,
> > you're essentially telling him/her that his/her preferences don't matter.
> > That's why.
> 
> What if they don't? I suppose MUAs which cannot handle this stuff
> automatically are
> pretty rare breed nowadays. There's is nothing wrong with using them,
> but it is wrong
> to force something needed because of shortcomings (ok, it's not a
> shortcoming, it's
> "feature")  of your preferred MUA on everyone else.

Um . . . it wasn't suggested that we should try to accomodate the
majority of MUAs, which probably all have certain general classes of
features.  Instead, it was suggested that everyone use a *specific* MUA
to avoid "grief", if I recall the phrasing correctly.  Regardless, I for
one actually use an MUA that has excellent threading and sorting
capabilities, on a platform that allows me to do additional sorting and
munging using external tools (mutt on FreeBSD), so that obviously isn't
the reason I tend to lean toward wanting a visual marker for this list.

My reason is that I want ruby-talk traffic in my main inbox, and I want
to sort by thread, but I want to be able to discern ruby-talk (and other
list traffic) at a glance.  One of the big reasons for this is to be able
to more quickly ascertain whether a particular message is spam that has
managed to slip through or a badly titled list message -- but that's only
one reason.

You're apparently assuming that everyone who has different preferences
from you is:

  1. a luddite with an underfeatured MUA

  2. stubbornly unwilling to sort the "right" way

  3. trying to make up for personal shortcomings by changing the way the
  list is managed

. . . which is kind of a shitty attitude about your fellow list members.


> 
> Gmail can handle headers without the need to spam subject lines, so can
> Mail on OS X, Thunderbird, and I am sure plenty of other mainstream MUAs.
> If someone loves his MUA he will have to love its deficiencies to, that's what
> love is about, isn't it?

So can mutt, which I'm using.  My preference for visible list markers has
nothing to do with that, and I don't know where you got the idea that
anyone that wants to be able to identify the source of a given message at
a glance without giving up other identifying information must be using
the mail command and sed as his MUA.


> 
> BTW, changing tools from time to time can be a very good idea. Especially if the
> change is for the more capable tool. There may be some productivity
> loss at first
> (but not in MUAs case, I must say), but you are better off in a long run.

"Change is good, so use what I do."  That's not very helpful.


> 
> My preference is *not to have* redundant marking in the subject line.
> And I prefer not to have fixes that fix stuff for 10% and breaks it for the 90%.

You're overstating the case.


> 
> Do my preferences matter?

Sure.  So does your piss-poor attitude about the preferences of others.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Amazon.com interview candidate: "When C++ is your hammer, everything starts
to look like your thumb."