Broken newsgroup threading (was: Re: An observation)

[Jeff Nowakowski]

On 05/03/2012 06:07 AM, Tobias Pankrath wrote:
>
> Does the D newsgroup have broken threading in mutt? In my client
> threading breaks often because some answers starts new thread
> etc. makes the hole thing useless.

The broken threading is caused by the Mailman newsgroup to mailing list 
gateway, as described in this post: 
http://forum.dlang.org/post/akftpzpkwuoqmfzijhor@dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net

I was looking briefly at this issue recently, as it was getting annoying 
to follow the large threads in my newsreader, and it seems to me that 
the Mailman stance of changing the Message-ID is wrong. They claim they 
are just trying to follow the RFCs by generating their own unique ID, 
but reading RFC 2822 makes it clear that they are misguided:

"The uniqueness of the message identifier is guaranteed by the host that 
generates it (see below)."

My comment: In other words, they shouldn't be assuming responsibility 
for this.

"Note: There are many instances when messages are "changed", but those 
changes do not constitute a new instantiation of that message, and 
therefore the message would not get a new message identifier. [..] The 
addition of such header fields does not change the identity of the 
message and therefore the original "Message-ID:" field is retained. In 
all cases, it is the meaning that the sender of the message wishes to 
convey (i.e., whether this is the same message or a different message) 
that determines whether or not the "Message-ID:" field changes, not any 
particular syntactic difference that appears (or does not appear) in the 
message."

My comment: Making the intention of the Message-ID clear, and in fact by 
generating a new one they are working against its purpose.

I found two Mailman bug reports with patches regarding this issue:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/266263
https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/496233

I may or may not follow up on this with the Mailman folks. If somebody 
else wants to feel free.