[Mailman-Developers] Dates again

[Barry Warsaw]

On Thu, 2004-12-23 at 13:28, Steven Kuck wrote:

> As I've said, I don't speak Python.  I submitted the hack I created, and 
> while it was rightly criticized for it's lack of subtlety, no one 
> pointed out that those changes would have unintended consequences that 
> would break the software.  THAT was of great comfort.  It has -intended- 
> consequences that you might not like, but I've been running with it for 
> more than a month now and what had been a regular issue with mis-dated 
> messages is GONE.  Completely.  There has not been a single complaint, 
> or even a mention, that the dates were changed out from under the 
> author.  The date is important, but I don't know any author who 
> considers it part of their composition.
> 
> My hope was that other people more fluent in Python might pick up the 
> gauntlet.  For me, the hack works and it's simple enough to re-hack once 
> in a while for a new version release.  There have been a couple 
> proposals for the algorithm - nothing from the future, messages can't 
> come from before a message they reference...  While I could probably 
> learn to do a Python future date compare in a few minutes, I don't know 
> how to look up the date of a referenced message.

This is the beauty of open source.  Personally, I'd rather not have this
option in standard Mailman for a number of reasons, but because it's all
free software, who cares what I think? :)  You don't have to, because
you can make this pile of stuff do whatever you want, if the itch is
annoying enough!

My reasons include a strong adherence to the least-munge rule, and the
aversion to ever more options.  Every option or configuration variable
you add increases the maintenance burden, opportunity for bugs, and
cognitive overhead for understanding and documenting the system.  These
days I don't think it's particularly difficult to set your computer's
clock to a reasonably accurate time.
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