Fw: innd suggestion

[Bill Davidsen]

On 9 Apr 2000, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Sorry about the delayed response to this really old mail message.
> 
> Ross Golder <rossg at vale.co.uk> writes:
> 
> > I would like to suggest dropping the date from the subject mail
> > generated by the news.daily script, as when using a mail reader that
> > does threading, it creates a seperate thread for each report. As the
> > date is already present in the header and body of the email, it is not
> > required in the subject. See attached patch.
> 
> As someone who uses a threaded mail reader to read news.daily reports, I
> really like this behavior; I prefer to see each nightly report in a
> separate thread.  I'm not even sure why one would want them all to be one
> thread....

Bad idea, at least as default. I want to be able to select the report
easily at the header level.

However, there is merit to allowing the Subject to be *easily* set without
recompiling source code. How about an argument to news.daily which gives
the subject, or a file containing the subject? Or better yet, just check
for a file <pathetc>/daily.subject and use it if it exists?

In any case, if we do this there should be a set of escape sequences
available. Some possible ones:
  \m - machine name
  \M - machine FQDN
  \d - date only, YYYY/MM/DD
  \D - Full date per "Date:" line specs

These are just examples, treat them as suggestions if you want. You could
also use something like \d"string" where the date command would be called
with +"string" and you could format as desired. Everybody supports date
formatting by now, no? Anybody else got a SysIII box running? Good.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.