Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Thomas Klausner]

Hi!

I just subscribed to this list and tried reading it in tin.

tin didn't recognize the mails. With help of a tin developer I tracked
it down and found that the mails from this mailing list come with
Date:<TAB>$DATE, i.e. "Date:	Mon, 13 Sep 2010 08:15:48 +0100 (CET)"
instead of
Date:<SPACE>$DATE, i.e. "Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2010 08:15:48 +0100 (CET)"

While this doesn't seem to be forbidden by the RFC, I think it is
at least uncommon, and here it causes trouble. Could you please change
this?

Thanks,
 Thomas

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 15:02, Thomas Klausner <tk@giga.or.at> wrote:

> While this doesn't seem to be forbidden by the RFC, I think it is
> at least uncommon, and here it causes trouble. Could you please change
> this?

Wouldn't it be better to just change tin to be RFC compliant?

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Chris Packham]

On 13/09/10 11:03, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 15:02, Thomas Klausner <tk@giga.or.at> wrote:
> 
>> While this doesn't seem to be forbidden by the RFC, I think it is
>> at least uncommon, and here it causes trouble. Could you please change
>> this?
> 
> Wouldn't it be better to just change tin to be RFC compliant?

There is also a problem with your definition of "uncommon". I haven't
checked but I'm guessing the tabs are there for every mailing list run
by vger.kernel.org. Those are some of the highest volume mailing lists
that I know of. It can't be to hard to change tin to parse a tab or
space character.

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Thomas Klausner]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 06:03:03PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> Wouldn't it be better to just change tin to be RFC compliant?

It is compliant to the ones for News. They specify a space after the
colon.

The ones for mail are a bit more relaxed, it seems.
 Thomas

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Thomas Klausner]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:24:59AM -0700, Chris Packham wrote:
> There is also a problem with your definition of "uncommon". I haven't
> checked but I'm guessing the tabs are there for every mailing list run
> by vger.kernel.org. Those are some of the highest volume mailing lists
> that I know of. It can't be to hard to change tin to parse a tab or
> space character.

I'm sorry if you don't like my choice of words. I have subscribed to a
number of mailing lists and read them in tin without stumbling over
this problem.

Is my request so much to ask?
 Thomas

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 18:30, Thomas Klausner <tk@giga.or.at> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:24:59AM -0700, Chris Packham wrote:
>> There is also a problem with your definition of "uncommon". I haven't
>> checked but I'm guessing the tabs are there for every mailing list run
>> by vger.kernel.org. Those are some of the highest volume mailing lists
>> that I know of. It can't be to hard to change tin to parse a tab or
>> space character.
>
> I'm sorry if you don't like my choice of words. I have subscribed to a
> number of mailing lists and read them in tin without stumbling over
> this problem.
>
> Is my request so much to ask?

Well, yeah. You're asking that someone that maintains the mailing list
go and modify the mailing list software due to some trivial bug in a
non-RFC compliant client.

The bug can presumably just be fixed by changing something like this
in tin:

    while (*s++ == '') { ... }

to:

    while (isspace(*s++)) { ... }

So why not just do that? Then you'll have fixed the bug for all tin
users regardless of what mailing list they're subscribing to.

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Chris Packham]

On 13/09/10 11:30, Thomas Klausner wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:24:59AM -0700, Chris Packham wrote:
>> There is also a problem with your definition of "uncommon". I haven't
>> checked but I'm guessing the tabs are there for every mailing list run
>> by vger.kernel.org. Those are some of the highest volume mailing lists
>> that I know of. It can't be to hard to change tin to parse a tab or
>> space character.
> 
> I'm sorry if you don't like my choice of words. I have subscribed to a
> number of mailing lists and read them in tin without stumbling over
> this problem.

And I'm sorry if that came of a little terse. Honestly since the advent
of web based mail/news viewers I've never really bothered with using one
so I'm fairly ignorant.

> Is my request so much to ask?
>  Thomas

My point was you're not asking the maintainer of the git mailing list to
change something. You're asking the maintainers of all mailing lists run
from vger.kernel.org to change something (i.e. a much greater scale).
Again my ignorance as to how things are run at kernel.org may be
distorting reality.

You may get more mileage out of asking the developers of the majordomo
software [1]. But even if they do make a change it may take a while to
be deployed on kernel.org

[1] http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Andreas Schwab]

Thomas Klausner <tk@giga.or.at> writes:

> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 06:03:03PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>> Wouldn't it be better to just change tin to be RFC compliant?
>
> It is compliant to the ones for News. They specify a space after the
> colon.
>
> The ones for mail are a bit more relaxed, it seems.

Mail is not news, but if you prefer news you can use news.gmane.org.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Jay Soffian]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 2:58 PM, Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com> wrote:
> You may get more mileage out of asking the developers of the majordomo

AFAIK, majordomo hasn't been touched in almost a decade, so I doubt it.

j.

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Thomas Klausner]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:58:13AM -0700, Chris Packham wrote:
> You may get more mileage out of asking the developers of the majordomo
> software [1]. But even if they do make a change it may take a while to
> be deployed on kernel.org

Thanks for the tip.

I don't think it's a problem with majordomo, though. I'm subscribed to
a lot of majordomo lists without seeing tabs in the date field.
 Thomas

Re: Mailing list headers: Date:<TAB> instead of Date:<SPACE>

[Thomas Klausner]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 10:47:38PM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Mail is not news, but if you prefer news you can use news.gmane.org.

That's a good idea, thanks.
 Thomas