Re: [Boost-users] Mailing list etiquettes (Was: Re: Copy from stream to vector)

From: Michael Linck (mgl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-11-09 20:38:53

Jens, I appreciate your advice.  Thank you for reminding me of the
"rules."  You have a valid point that I could have left a particular
snippet of the original post to make clear what I was referring to,
since the subject line apparently wasn't enough, and I do remember
reading about quoting style in the guidelines.  I would use "response"
type quoting, underneath the text being responded to whenever I find a
way to actually make contextual sense out of it.  In this case, I guess
I decided it was less convenient.  To address some other points:

> LERN PROPERLY QUOTING!
> 
> > "vector<int> V;
> > copy(istream_iterator<int>(cin), istream_iterator<int>(),
> >      back_inserter(V));"
> > 
> > from: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/istream_iterator.html

as far as I know the actual point behind "quoting" in this context is
merely not to claim credit for some part of a piece of writing.  As I
attributed the quote to the website where it originated, I believe that
purpose has been served.

> Michael, it seems you do not respond to any quote as all your text is
> above. Why the hell to you not drop the following text?

True, but I was responding to a long string of e-mails in which no-one
else seemed to get involved in.  I was also trying to point out that an
issue that the original poster was having was probably not related to
boost.

> Boost lists are for subscribers only. To subscribe you have nearly
> always to read http://www.boost.org/more/discussion_policy.htm (links
> from http://www.boost.org/more/mailing_lists.htm). Did you forget about
> all guidelines (which are bt obvious and also true for nearly all other
> lists and also newsgroups, forums, ...).

Noted.  I did not really forget, as mentioned above.  The minimal
effective amount of quoting from the sender seemed, to me, to be the
subject line.

> Even if this is the first and only mailing list you ever used I wonder
> about this very unusual quoting style ...

Why should there only be one way to quote another's e-mail, much less to
quote something from a website?  I'm sorry if you didn't get the context
of the discussion, but as I explained, in that particular post I was
merely pointing out that the problem being discussed in the thread
probably wasn't a boost issue.  I didn't see any reason to quote the
actual problem in the thread.

As for the following

> 
> This also affects:
> 
> > On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 11:45 -0700, Ricardo Mayerhofer wrote:

...
you got me.  I was too lazy to delete it because I figured people would
get what was going on there and stop reading anyway, so I wasn't really
wasting anyone's time by not wasting my own.

Since you like the standards, I'd like to point out one final thing:

"In addition to technical skills, Boost members value collaboration,
acknowledgement of the help of others, and a certain level of
politeness." -- http://www.boost.org/more/discussion_policy.htm

I think your use of profanity violates this rule, which I find pretty
important.

This is, in fact, the only e-mail list I've ever participated in.  I'm a
very hands on learner and I figured the fastest way to get better at
using boost was to start listening in on the e-mail list.  Occasionally
I read something that I feel I might, humbly, be able to contribute a
thought to.  I apologize if it's taking me a while to get used to the
exact format you're looking for, but I think you could have taken a
better, less confrontational, and equally effective tack on pointing out
that I need to pay more attention to it.

thanks anyway,

mike