On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:19:09 -0700, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
The two messages I got from this list are exactly the same as on your blog. Sure that the truncating isn't happening on the receiving end of your pipe?
That's odd, then. I asked a few people to look at it, and the first to respond said they had received a truncated version (unless there was a miscommunication), and the versions in the list archive -- http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-June/094246.html and http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-June/094248.html -- appear to be truncated as well. It may be worth noting both you and I have gmail addresses, but beyond that I don't know what to make of this. Apologies for any confusion/annoyance caused.
You appear to have been a victim of the infamous "Unix 'From' line misfeature", where the word "From" at the start of a line is treated by Unix-based programs (and those in other operating systems imitating their behavior) as an indication of the start of a new message in the standard 'mbox' format, which can result in peculiar behavior when it appears in the middle of a message. In this case, it seems the mailers involved insert a ">" mark at the start of a line beginning with "From", which messes the format a bit and makes part of your text look like a quote, but otherwise preserves the message intact as it goes out to people's mailboxes. However, the process that archives the list for the Web doesn't do this, and instead truncates right before the "From".
The "Unix-Haters' Handbook" gripes about this.