On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:19:09 -0700, Luna <lunasantin(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Chris Howie
<cdhowie(a)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.
--
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