[Mailman-Developers] Pipermail threading and Debian bug 167758

[Max Bowsher]

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Pipermail's threadKeys currently assume that the Date header of each
mail message sent to the list is unique.

If two messages with the same Date both start new threads, then the
thread display in the pipermail archives will erroneously intermingle
the two threads. This is
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=167758
.

Debian have applied a patch to fix this, by including Message-IDs in the
threadKeys too. Ironically, this actually creates an even worse bug,
since they have failed to notice that '-' is a perfectly legal character
in a message-id, thus, when pipermail counts the number of '-'
characters in the threadKey to determine the nesting depth, it often
gets a totally wrong answer.

This happens often, since all it needs is a message-id containing a
dash. Exim message-ids always contain at least two, and message-ids
often include domain names, which sometimes include dashes.


So, after that little bit of rambling, my essential question is:

Was there ever any previous discussion about this issue, or did the
Debian folks not raise the issue upstream?

Max.

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