Good point -- avoid excessive "thread history" (was: Re: SELinux vs. AppArmor vs. Standard vs. What?)

[Mike Schwartz]

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Ted Gould <ted at gould.cx> wrote:
> [...snip...]
> I believe that [...] not cleaning up the message to only
> include what you're replying to is worse than [...].
>
>                --Ted
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - [...]

The custom of leaving in the entire history of the thread, probably
goes back to when there were some unreliable old servers for
Usenet "newsgroup" postings, and some of the readers were
not threaded, and basically, if someone was reading something,
and they did not "happen" to remember what was said previously
in that thread, then maybe the only way to fill them in, was to
"never delete anything", and let the
>>>>>>> 's
at the left side of the page build up sometimes to such a depth
that sometimes only a fraction of the line was usable for text.
    ...and even then, I think it could be argued that the part
that a given replier was replying to, did not necessarily require
a big history book, to set up the chicken feed reply comment
(e.g., "yes I agree but what about the following picayune nit-pick")
or whatever the new reply was going to be.
   And NOWADAYS, most news readers -- and even some mail
readers, have threading features -- and in fact (!) so does the
archive on the web, of this mailing list ["PLUG-discuss"].
((e.g., I use gmail, and without its threading feature, reading
  "PLUG-discuss" used to be so painful that,
  back when gmail didn't exist yet,
  (I mostly used my "yahoo.com" mailbox, then)
  (which - at that time, at least - had NO threading features)
  (used yahoo for non-work stuff; that is;  Honeywell had us
     using [VAX] vms mail, and then later,
     "Microsoft mail" - a predecessor of Outlook...)
  the pain got so bad that
  I could not stand it, and I gave up and turned off the e-mail
  feature for "PLUG-discuss", and just read the messages
  [if at all] on some archive on the web.))
HENCE, the original reasons, in the past, for ever "leaving in"
tons of ["history"] stuff, are really no longer applicable, today;
but sometimes old habits die hard (inertia? anyone?)
so some folks still just leave things in, galore,
as a sort of thread history.
Probably due to "force of habit"...
plus, [oh yeah:] *laziness*!!  ( ..."cleaning up" does take
    a few mouse and/or keyboard commands...)
    I see your point -- that this practice is something
that should not be continued -- nowadays.
    Good point.
--
Mike Schwartz
Glendale  AZ
schwartz at acm.org