[plug] Installfest 2001 - Announce & Details.

[Greg Mildenhall]

For those of you who don't want to wade through a long pointless meta-post
like this, I refer you instead to Simon Scott's far more succinct summary
of what I am about to say.

On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Bret Busby wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Matt Kemner wrote:
> > On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Bret Busby wrote:
> >   There was no need to include 9 pages of text to add 2 pages down the
> > bottom.
> I had assumed that it was only one page. It certainly didn't appear as 9
> pages, in kmail.

That's obviously relative to page size. It makes no difference at all to
whether you should quote it.

> If the original message was 9 pages, there is another problem with the
> notice; from the context of the notice, which appeared to be for posting
> on noticeboards, and, for circulating via email; it was too long and,
> for all the words, said too little.

Oooh, look: there's a fishy in that barrel. Shall I shoot it?

> the wording and format of the notice (like a man page)appeared to be
> written for Linux/UNIX users, and, not for members of the public. This
> is an unfortunate thing, as it is like using all jargon, so that members
> of the public cannot understand

Which part was hard to understand?

> and, can make Linux appear as something for geeks and nerds.

It's not? What OS do geeks use where you come from? :)

> > You could have included the top few lines,snipped the middle, 
> > and included the PGP stuff at the bottom that you had issue with, and 
> > everybody would have known exactly what you were referring to. 
> The points were that the notice was insufficient,

To which the content is irrelevant.

> that nowhere in the notice, was adequate description given, of Linux,

Hence you were not replying to anything in the notice, so you didn't need
to quote any part of it.

> I had regarded the inclusion of the whole notice as necessary, as my
> response applied to the whole of the notice

Your response applied to something that was not in the notice, so there
was no point in quoting any it.

> as does the paragraph above, referring to the way that the notice was
> written that was not appropriate for members of the public who were not
> already Linux/UNIX users.

Which made perfect sense (FVLVOS) despite the fact you quoted no part of
the notice in this message. How was the previous case different?

> > > Please, listen to what we are trying to tell you.
> > I don't really want to enforce a "quoting" policy through the list server.
> It is also equally easy, to do what I encounter on some mailing lists,
> where no quote of the message to which a response is being made, is
> included,

Yes, it would have been very easy. If only you'd done so.

> so a person reading a response, has no idea as to what, or to whom, the
> response is being made.

That would definitely not have been the case in this situation. So long as
you kept the subject line, there was clearly only one notice you could
have been talking about. But yes, in many situations, quoting nothing is
even worse than quoting everything.

> It is all a matter of context, and, more bandwidth is wasted, by people on a
> miling list broadcasting complaints about quotations, than by the quotation

But this hopefully prevents a thousand similar problems in the future.

> this appears to be being used as a forum for the "Lets have a go at Bret
> again, since we haven't managed to get rid of him yet" movement,

We don't want to get rid of you, Bret, you're the list's main source of
entertainment. We just don't want to have to scroll through so much
bollocks hunting for your little gems.

> other recent responses that I have made, to other posted messages, have
> not included extraneous quoted parts of messages to which I have 
> responded.

Yes, you have done a perfectly good job of snipping/quoting of late:
thankyou for the effort. I don't think anyone has said otherwise until
this one rather flagrant transgression.

> So, a pox on your bollocks!

Ouch!

-Greg