[Mailman-Developers] in-reply-to problem

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:

	I don't think I'm being pessimistic here.  I think I'm being
	realistic.  There are no deterministic ways to figure out
	precisely which message is being replied to and which other
	messages are being referenced, unless you can guarantee that
	you can perfectly parse all possible quoting methods,

Oh, I admit that.  I just suspect that for the OP (1) grouping
subjects and (2) never violating Date order will typically result in a
Summary display that's "good enough".

If he wants to go so far as parsing quoting, well, I've written such
code and it was a dismal failure (ie, it did not improve visibly over
sorting by subject and date).  Doesn't mean it can't be done, by a
long shot ;-), but I would suggest it's cheaper to hire a moderator to
do the rethreading.

    Brad> 	Right, and as complex as [jwz's] algorithm is, it still
    Brad> requires "In-Reply-To:" and "References:" headers in order
    Brad> to be able to do it's job.

Actually, the complex part is all about ensuring that the true
threading operations are stable with respect to the subject/date
sort.  This is something that Gnus (for example) gets wrong.  I'd much
rather read a newsgroup with Gnus than Netscape 3 (I think it was),
but Netscape 3 did a far better job with mailing lists that lacked
true threading information.


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