On 08Jun2018 01:20, Tamara Berger <brg...@gmail.com> wrote:
Before I reply to the meat of your email, I guess we'd better clear up
your initial issues. You write:
"Replies inline below, which is the style we prefer on this list. (And to reply,
please reply to the specific message, not your original post. This will let you
pick up that branch of the conversation directly and not confuse your readers.)"
1. I don't know what you mean by "inline," though I do notice all the
single and double carets at the left margin. I don't understand the
underlying rationale for the different patterns. And how do I create
them, manually?
The inline style lets messages read like conversations, and lets you reply to
the preceeding message point by point.
If you look at the text above, you'll see:
On 08Jun2018 01:20, Tamara Berger <brg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Before I reply to the meat of your email, I guess we'd better clear up
and so on. You (the previous message) are identified and your text indented
with a leading ">" symbol. My replies come below each point in your email,
unindented and with a blank line separating them out.
Generally you keep just the context needed for your reply to make sense.
Sometimes that involves keeping some message quote from even earlier messages,
in which case _their_ intro line and text is preserved, with an extra level of
">", like this:
On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 10:27 PM Cameron Simpson <c...@cskk.id.au> wrote:
> Replies inline below, which is the style we prefer on this list. (And to
> reply,
> please reply to the specific message, not your original post. This will let
you
> pick up that branch of the conversation directly and not confuse your
readers.)
>
> On 07Jun2018 08:39, T Berger <brg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >... message text from you, now 2 messages back ...
Most mailers will arrange this nesting automatically for you. When you hit
Reply you get a new message with the previous message already quoted in the
text with leading ">" markers. All you need to do is trim it to just what you
need to keep for context.
If you're doing this via the Post Reply button here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.python
you'll find the previous message quoted.
Instead of just putting your reply at the top, and maybe hand quoting soe line
of text with cut/paste (which you seem to be doing), start scrolling down the
quoted text. Just cut out anything no longer needed (but keeping the
attribution. Then where you want to reply to a specifi point, insert a nice
blank line and put in your reply, and leave another blank line. Then proceed
down the rest of the quote deleting what isn't relevant and replying where you
want to.
The advantages here are (a) you can keep as much context at you like and
everyone can see that context because you've left it there and (b) the reply
reads like a discussion - people can see what you said right after the text to
which you're responding. For a reader, that is a huge advantage.
Anyway, that is the "inline" style, and a lot of techincal lists/groups use it
because it keeps things very understandable, not just for the people directly
involved but also for anyone else reading, who may decide to participate.
2. I also don't understand your instruction that I reply to the
specific message and not to my original post. I did not reply to my
own post but to Steven's comments. And then I brought up my main
issue, which had remained unaddressed by his email.
Ah, here the fun begins. There are several forums for this list/group :-( The
main two are the mailing list "python-list@pythonorg" and the newsgroup
"comp.lang.python". It looks like you're using the latter, but via the Google
Groups interface here (I'm guessing here from your message header lines):
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.python
Posts to one side are copied to the other. The mailing list has a lot less spam
(witness the many "solution manual" posts etc in the google groups forum view).
Anyway, at least one gateway between the newsgroup and the list is known to
mangle to In-Reply-To header on the the group->mail copy, which is what led me
to think you'd replied to the wrong message.
My apologies for that.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <c...@cskk.id.au>
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
