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

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

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

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

On 13/09/10 11:03, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 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.

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:24:59AM -0700, Chris Packham wrote:

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

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 18:30, Thomas Klausner <tk@giga.or.at> wrote:

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.

On 13/09/10 11:30, Thomas Klausner wrote:

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.

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/

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 2:58 PM, Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com> wrote:

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

j.

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:58:13AM -0700, Chris Packham wrote:

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

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 06:03:03PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

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

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

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

Andreas.

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 10:47:38PM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:

That's a good idea, thanks.
 Thomas