[WikiEN-l] ArbCom Legislation

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:19:09 -0700, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> 
wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Chris Howie <cdhowie at 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.

-- 
== Dan ==
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