On Wed, 25 Oct 2023, James Bottomley wrote: > On Wed, 2023-10-25 at 08:29 +1100, NeilBrown 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? > > So if I'm a brilliantly talented driver, it's OK for other people to > drive on the wrong side of the road because I should be able to avoid > them? No, we are programmers, not MUAs or drivers. We program the car to predict and avoid all other road users, no matter where they are. That project might take a bit longer than fixing MUAs though. > > The point being there are some situations where observing global > etiquette is way more helpful than an individual solution, however > talented the individual. True, and we all use (some version of) English for exactly that reason. But imagine how it would be if we could all have high quality translation code built into our MUAs so that anyone in the world could email us in their own language, and we could each read in our own language. That would be awesome. It would be only slightly less awesome if we could all post with whichever quoting style works for us, and we could all read emails seeing whichever quoting style works for us. Unfortunately we cannot yet translate top-posting to post-posting, but we *can* translate verbose quoting to terse quoting. NeilBrown
