Function attributes [OT]

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Sat Feb 13 08:14:29 EST 2010


Mark Lawrence wrote:
> Gabriel Genellina wrote:
>> En Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:29:12 -0300, Arnaud Delobelle
>> <arnodel at googlemail.com> escribió:
>>
>>> I posted an example of a decorator that does just this in this thread a
>>> couple of days ago:
>>>
>>> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2010-February/1235742.html
>>
>> Ouch! I didn't see your post, nor several other earlier posts in this
>> thread. In fact, I thought mine was the *first* reply when I wrote it!
> 
> It's not just me then.  I'm using Thunderbird on Windows Vista to view
> the group via gmane, and notice the earlier parts of a thread can show
> up hours or even days after the later ones.  Would something who
> understands these things be kind enough to explain why this happens, or
> at least provide the keywords needed for google, as I haven't got a clue
> where to start.
> 
There are two main channels feeding the comp.lang.python newsgroup.
Gmane is primarily a news (NNTP-based) service, though for reasons best
know to the organizers they choose to rename the standard newsgroups to
fit their own idea of how the universe should be organized, so there the
group becomes gmane.comp.python.general.

The first feed is the general interchange of articles between NNTP
servers: while this is usually a reliable interchange mechanism, an
individual server can "glitch" occasionally (by losing network
connectivity, for example, or when some part of its news support
mechanism breaks temporarily).

The second is the python-list mailing list, maintained as a part of the
python.org infrastructure (by a hard-working team of volunteers, I
should add, who get little enough credit for the sterling work they do
day in day out to keep the real information flowing and the spam out).

More recently the waters have been muddied by Google Groups, which sadly
seems at time to be so badly managed (or simply not managed?) as to make
it a principal source of spam. This surprises me, as Gmail appears to
have very effective spam filtering. Many people appear to use Google
Groups as their primary interface to newsgroups and/or mailing lists to
the extent that they believe the Groups interface to be what everyone
uses to access the list.

The task of maintaining a two-way bridge between the comp.lang.python
NNTP community and the python-list email community while filtering out
the spam and ensuring that posts aren't duplicated too often is a
difficult one. For example, I hit "reply all" to your message, and had I
not trimmed the headers my NNTP client (Thunderbird) would have sent
copies to you, to the mailing list AND to the newsgroup. Sometimes such
messages do appear twice, particularly (in my experience) to recipients
who use the email channel.

In short, these things happen because life is complicated and the
technical solutions available to disambiguate the feeds aren't perfect.
So you might consider filing the glitches under "shit happens". Speaking
personally I wouldn't have a clue how to keep this stuff going on a
daily basis at the volume level we see on this group, and I am very
grateful to everyone who does.

regards
 Steve
-- 
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