On Wed, 25 Oct 2023, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> Hi Neil,
>
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:29 PM NeilBrown <neilb@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Wed, 25 Oct 2023, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
> > > On 23/10/2023 20:49, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 19 Oct 2023 07:11:36 +0300 Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >> Yesterday someone on my lists just sent an email looking for kernel
> > > >> tasks.
> > > >
> > > > Well here's a task: write a bot which follows the mailing lists and
> > > > sends people nastygrams if one of their emails is more than 95%(?)
> > > > quoted text.
> > > >
> > > > It's happening significantly more lately. Possibly because the gmail
> > > > client helpfully hides quoted text.
> > >
> > > I would also point to reviewers and maintainers who give a Rb/Ack tag:
> > > 1. somewhere at the top, without any footer like Best regards, and then
> > > quote entire patch, so I don't know shall I look for more comments after
> > > Rb/Ack?
> > >
> > > 2. quote entire email and then add Rb/Ack, so I need to figure out
> > > whether there was something between the hundreds of lines of text or not.
> >
> > Here we all are, brilliantly talented computer programmers who spend
> > our days making amazing fast digital devices do amazingly clever and
> > subtle things, inventing time-saving tools and processing vast amounts
> > of data without blinking, but for some reason we think the task of
> > skipping over a few thousand lines that all start with '> " is too hard
> > for us and that we should, in stead, complain to some other human to
> > convince them to make our life easier for us.
> >
> > Does anyone else see the irony?
>
> Please compare the numbers:
> 1. 1 sender removes irrelevant parts,
> 2. N receivers skip irrelevant parts.
That is one way to look at the numbers.
Another is:
12 - fix about a dozen MUAs to summaries quotes properly
12000 - fix an unknownable number of people to quote just exactly the
amount that their particular audience is going to want
and when it comes to fixing-code versus fixing-people, I know which this
community is better at.
I guess there is also the option
1 - fix vger.kernel.org to reject postings from people who don't
think and quote like "us", because we already have too many
contributor and want to block the heretics
This is really just a form of the "platform problem" which lwn.net has
occasionally written about. The "problem" is that we treat the platform
(library code or other infrastructure) as fixed and develop ugly hacks
in our own code to work around some shortcoming, rather the going into
the platform and fixing it once for everyone there.
NeilBrown
