Eli Brandt wrote:
> 
> Jean Piche wrote:
> > I have asked James to set the subject_prefix majordomo flag to the name of the
> > list. This way, a [csound] gets automatically prefixed to the subject line of
> > every post. If noone likes that, we can always go back to the old ways... yes?
> 
> Does majordomo have a subject_suffix?  I get 32 characters of useful
> subject line in an 80-column window, and it seems a pity to lose a
> quarter of that for a tag that adds no information.  If I'm getting the
> point of this, it's for the benefit of mail programs whose authors should
> be slapped around until they discover the Sender: line?  Presumably a tag
> at either end would serve equally well...

And if I'm getting the point of your objection, not doing it would be for the
benefit of mail programs whose authors should be slapped around for providing 32
characters' worth of subject line? The point is to be able to sort on "subject"
key. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a suffix would hardly do that. 


-- 
________________________________________________________
Jean Piche
Universite de Montreal
http://mistral.ere.umontreal.ca/~pichej
http://www.musique.umontreal.ca/electro/CEC/

Jean Piche wrote:
> The point is to be able to sort on "subject" key. 

OK, that's what I didn't get -- that amenability to pure field-sorting
was the goal.

(It's with good reason that people are reluctant to switch software,
but there are advantages to mail software that has the concept of
filing in different bins.  Working on every mailing list, preserving
time-ordering on personal mail, etc.)

> And if I'm getting the point of your objection, not doing it would be for the
> benefit of mail programs whose authors should be slapped around for providing 32
> characters' worth of subject line? 

I knew somebody would say that, but it's not as symmetric as it looks.
In one case, the mail-agent's author enhances it; in the other, I
reallocate screen space.  Some more of folks' names can go, but beyond
that it's buy a bigger monitor, or read painful fonts, or stop using
two windows side by side.  Or, in reality, just accept that subject
lines will be marginally less readable.  (In principle I ought to hack
my mail software to apply context-sensitive rewrite expressions to
text before displaying it.)

If the change makes people happy, fine; no real skin off my teeth.
Maybe it's less a pragmatic objection than a moral/aesthetic one, that
it's better for machine-readable information to be _used_ than to be
duplicated as visual clutter in a human-read field.  But hey, software
annoys me all the time, and I haven't snapped yet.

-- 
     Eli Brandt  |  eli+@cs.cmu.edu  |  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/