Lame mailing list software (was: svn commit: r36404 ...)

[Greg Stein <gs...@gmail.com>]

For efficiency reasons, the system has converted the large body of this message into an attachment.

Re: Lame mailing list software (was: svn commit: r36404 ...)

[Stefan Sperling <st...@elego.de>]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 07:55:12PM -0800, Greg Stein wrote:
> I have chosen Gmail as my mail client. For very large emails, it clips
> the message and then offers a link if you'd like to see the full
> message. However, since the email below is a *short* email, but with a
> very large inline attachment, I *do not* get that choice. Instead, it
> is simply clipped.

It's not half as annoying in mutt, because it just shows
the second text attachment after the first, with a small
seperator string in-between: "[-- Attachment #2 --]"
(I know this is not an answer for you, just pointing out
what it looks like at my end.)

But it's very annoying in the tigris.org archives, where
when clicking on an attachment in a commit mail to get
the content of a mail causes firefox to ask you to save
the file because it does not know what to do with mime-type
"RFC-822 data".

Example:
http://subversion.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=495&dsMessageId=1285735

> How am I supposed to do my work here? Why should we continue to stick
> with mailing list software that seems to break us every few weeks?
> (witness the loss of mail headers last weekend, after an unannounced
> downtime and "upgrade"; or the half-day "scheduled maintenance" a
> month ago?)

I'd like to see this fixed as well. The old behaviour (prior to
the massive tigris.org update a few months ago) was fine.
Please put it back (yes, I would not mind a downgrade to old version!).

Stefan

Re: Lame mailing list software (was: svn commit: r36404 ...)

["Hyrum K. Wright" <hy...@mail.utexas.edu>]

On Mar 7, 2009, at 9:55 PM, Greg Stein wrote:

> For efficiency reasons, the system has converted the large body of  
> this message into an attachment.
>
> Months ago, when the mailing list software was "upgraded" into this
> broken state, you said there were people working on it with the
> highest priority and non-stop. What is the status of that work? When
> are we going to get a mailing list that doesn't turn large emails into
> attachments? (you know, like *every other* piece of mailing list
> software on the planet)
>
> The commit below has been made unreviewable by the software on  
> tigris.org.
>
> I have chosen Gmail as my mail client. For very large emails, it clips
> the message and then offers a link if you'd like to see the full
> message. However, since the email below is a *short* email, but with a
> very large inline attachment, I *do not* get that choice. Instead, it
> is simply clipped.
>
> How am I supposed to do my work here? Why should we continue to stick
> with mailing list software that seems to break us every few weeks?
> (witness the loss of mail headers last weekend, after an unannounced
> downtime and "upgrade"; or the half-day "scheduled maintenance" a
> month ago?)
>
> "Choose another mail client" is not a very good answer, I'd think,
> since no other piece of mailing list software has ever made me do
> that. Nor do I see it as a good option for our project to dictate my
> choices of a mail client. There are other options for our mailing list
> that do not cause this kind of pain, this amount of downtime, or this
> lack of reliability.

Just one more bit of brokenness just discovered in Discussion  
Services: it munges the Content-Type headers of messages in transit.   
That's a Bad Thing.

(In this specific instance, my mailer sends the following header:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes

but what comes through the mailing list is:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

That's bad form on the part of the mailing list software.)

-Hyrum

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http://subversion.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=462&dsMessageId=1304247