guido@boring.UUCP (07/06/85)
In article <487@oliveb.UUCP> jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) writes: >Maybe we need a new header ala: > Subject: caramel sauce > Originally: hot pepper oil > References: <1495@utah-gr.UUCP> Here's a way to change the subject line while at the same time keeping the old subject line around for news readers that chain subjects or automatically junk certain subjects. It doesn't need new header lines. It does, however, depend on the way "rn" does its subject matching. As you might have guessed from my subject line, the trick is to put the new subject IN FRONT of the old subject. Example: - you follow up to an article with Subject: wombat food - the default subject of your article (provided by your newsreader) is Subject: Re: wombat food - in the editor, change the subject to Subject: Why am I so shy (Re: wombat food) Why does this work? "Rn" uses the following regular expression for matching subjects: : *<old title with any initial Re:'s deleted goes here> This finds the old title whenever it is preceded by a colon and zero or more spaces. Thus subject-chaining and killing recognize this article as a followup (which is the main reason for not changing subject lines; I agree that this is important) while the human reader easily spots the new, possibly interesting subject. I prefer this over "Re: wombat food (really Why am I so shy)" because it expresses more clearly (to the user not yet spoiled by net conventions) what has happened: a followup to one article has really started a new discussion. Too bad it probably doesn't work with older newsreaders such as readnews. (There really is no reason why you should still use that -- "rn" is public domain and runs on almost every Unix machine in the universe, and its user interface is uniformly better than that of readnews.) Guido van Rossum, "Stamp Out BASIC" Committee, CWI, Amsterdam guido@mcvax.UUCP