Re: [tlug] screen goes blank when installing SuSE on PowerBook G4

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Joseph" == Joseph Essertier <essertier@example.com> writes:

    Joseph> I guess i clicked on "Reply" instead of "Compose." I
    Joseph> didn't know that doing that will attach one's message to
    Joseph> someone else's thread, even when one uses a different
    Joseph> subject line.

Regarding netiquette, there's no need to apologize IMO.  If you change
the subject header it's an ignorable violation.  The real issue is
that people who are reading the thread are likely to simply kill your
subthread _before reading the message_ because it's in the way---_you_
lose.  What really is annoying is if you _don't_ change the subject.

About SuSE, yes, you should try a SuSE channel, too.  They probably
have one specifically for Mac issues.  It's not unreasonable to post
here, though.

Technical details about threads.  There are three ways to identify
threads.

(1) Similar (ie, the same up to Re: and list id/serial number affixes)
    Subject headers, sorted by date.  Obviously unreliable: suppose
    two people reply to the same message?  The thread should split,
    but this method can't tell.  You could generalize to fuzzy subject
    and message body content analysis, but the basic problem remains.

(2) In-Reply-To header chaining.  Theoretically this is sufficient to
    create the tree structure.  (By analogy, if you are told that
    Mark's parent is Sally, and Joe's parent is Ruth, and Ruth's
    parent is Sally, with little effort you can tell me all of the
    relationships.  Except that since I didn't tell you that Sally is
    short for Salvador, you probably thought Sally was somebody's
    mother. ;-)

(3) References headers.  Similar to In-Reply-To, with extra
    redundancy: it usually contains many ancestor messages.  However,
    there's no guarantee that References contains all of the relevant
    messages, so it's not a complete answer, you often need to do some
    backward chaining to get the whole thread.  Also, neither
    references nor in-reply-to can reach back across a message without
    those headers, so you need to go back to style (1).

For more than you ever want to know, see Jamie Zawinski's discussion
of the algorithm used in pre-Mozilla Netscapes
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html.

Most MUAs do not present the References and In-Reply-To headers, nor
do they provide an option to present them.  So most users think of
threading as magic AI that somehow groks the messages, but that's not
so.  It's quite explicit if you know where to look.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.