[Rd] Suggestions for R-devel / R-help digest format

Matthew Dowle mdowle at mdowle.plus.com
Fri Jul 8 13:17:32 CEST 2011


Don't most people use a newsreader? For example, pointed to here :
    gmane.comp.lang.r.general
    gmane.comp.lang.r.devel

IIUC, NNTP downloads headers only, when you open any post it downloads the 
body at that
point. So it's more efficient than email (assuming you don't open every 
single post). I guess
RSS is similar/better. Newsreaders handle threading and you can watch/ignore 
threads easily.

Actually subscribing via email?  The only reason I am subscribed is to post 
unmoderated (and to
encourage Martin with +1 on his subscriber count); I have email delivery 
turned off in the mailman
settings.  Thought everyone did that!   If I counted correctly, there are 36 
gmane mirrors for
various packages and sigs. You can watch all these (including r-devel and 
r-help) via gmane without
needing to subscribe on mailman at all.

Matthew

"Saravanan" <saravanan.thirumuruganathan at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:4E160850.1040404 at gmail.com...
> Thanks Steve and Brian !
>
> Probably, I will create a gmail account for mailing lists and let it take 
> care of the threading.
>
> Regards,
> Saravanan
>
> On 07/07/2011 12:02 PM, Brian G. Peterson wrote:
>> On Thu, 2011-07-07 at 11:44 -0500, Saravanan wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I am passive reader of both R-devel and R-help mailing lists. I am
>>> sending the following comments to r-devel as it seemed more suitable. I
>>> am aware that this list uses GNU mailman for the list management. I have
>>> my options set that it sends a email digest. One thing I find is that
>>> the digest consists of emails that ordered temporarlly. For eg lets say
>>> there are two threads t1 and t2 and the emails arrive as e1 of t1, e2 of
>>> t2, e3 of t3  . The digest lists them as e1,e2 and then e3. Is it
>>> possible to somehow configure it as T1 : e1,e3 and then T2 : e2 ?
>>>
>>> This is the digest format that google groups uses which is incredibly
>>> helpful as you can read all the messages in a thread. Additionally, it
>>> also helpfully includes a header that lists all the threads in digest so
>>> that you can jump to the one you are interested in. I checked the
>>> mailman options but could not find any.
>>>
>>> Does anyone else have the same issue? It is not a big issue in R-devel
>>> but R-help is a much more high traffic mailing list. I am interested in
>>> hearing how you read/filter your digest mails in either R-help or other
>>> high volume mailing lists.
>> This really has nothing to do with R, but rather mailman.
>>
>> I use folders, filtered on the server using SIEVE and/or procmail.  No
>> digest required. I get the mails immediately, not later in the day or
>> the next day,  and can use all my various email clients easily to
>> read/respond.
>>
>> mailman supports a MIME digest format that includes a table of contents
>> with links to each MIME part.  mailman does not support a threaded
>> digest, to the best of my knowledge.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>>     - Brian
>>
>



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