Re: Proposal: Subject of ruby-core ML article should include artile number

Hello Koichi,

I think I very much understand your needs. However, on some mailers
(including mine), adding something like [ruby-core:16808] at the
start of a Subject means that it is essentially impossible to
sort by real subject (it is easy to sort by order of appearance
by just sorting by date). This is less of a problem for mailers
with threading, but not all mailers have threading. At the least,
please consider appending the number to the subject, not
prepending it (as already suggested by Shot).

Putting a sequence number into the subject is in some way a
misuse of the subject field, which should be what is says,
namely the subject. The mail count number is already available
in another header (X-Mail-Count:). This may show up on some
mailers, and not on others (in mine, I have have to press a
"Blah" button to see it).

At W3C, we developped another system to address some of the
problems you have mentioned. I wrote it up in RFC 5064
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5064.txt). It works by adding an
Archived-At: header to a mail that passes through a mailing
list. The information is not just a number, but an URI,
which means it is even easier to find the mail, by just
clicking on the URI. The URI therefore also can be sent
to third parties who may not know how to get from the number
to the archived message. This worked extremely well at
W3C, where putting references to emails into other emails
and Web pages was very frequent. In Joel's words, that's
a shortcut that works for everybody without having to set
up anything.

The problem with Archived-At is that it's easy to implement
if mailing list distribution and archiving are handled by
the same party, but it is difficult to implement if the
archive(s) are totally separate. That may be a problem for
the current ruby-core, but that may also be a chance to set
up a better and less ugly archive/interface.

Just my two yen.     Regards,    Martin.

At 20:20 08/05/20, SASADA Koichi wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I propose that subject of ruby-core mailing list articles should
>include artile number such as [ruby-core:12345].  It's is not for
>all of ML but only for ruby-core ML.  This mailing list is for ruby
>development.  Subject prefix helps us to specify the article.
>
>Pros.
>  - We can search ML article with Subject search.
>  - We can copy and paste article number easily to ChangeLog,
>    another post, IRC, and so on.
>
> "Writing ChangeLog easily" is most strong point.
>
>
>Cons.
>  - Not simple.
>  - It is not convinient for the guys
>    who use legacy mailer which doesn't support references.
>
>
>I add a subject prefix locally, it is mostly convinient for me.  But
>if I reply it, it remains (see [ruby-core:16808]).
>
>Regards,
>-- 
>// SASADA Koichi at atdot dot net


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp      mailto:[e-mail]