Subject: Re: bug#335: bug tracking system leads to duplicate replies appearing

From: Don Armstrong <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 20:20:31 -0700

On Thu, 29 May 2008, Joe Wells wrote:
> I believe this is due to messages being addressed to both
> [email-masked] and [email-masked] where XYZ
> is the bug number. When someone follows up, their message gets sent
> to [email-masked] twice, because everything sent to
> [email-masked] will also be sent onward to
> [email-masked].

This is because people are using reply-to-all, instead of
reply-to-list or reply-to. I can resolve this by discarding duplicate
message ids, but thats more of a sledgehammer. Far better would be for
people to stop being silly and using reply-to-all, and instead use
reply-to-list or reply-to, both of which are set properly and behave
correctly.
 
> Interestingly, by the time these two copies show up in the
> gnu.emacs.bug USENET newsgroup, they have the two different message
> IDs <[email-masked]> and
> <[email-masked]>.
>
> By the way, it seems at first glance that none of these are the
> original message ID of Stefan's message, but instead these are fresh
> message IDs chosen by the bug tracking software and mailing list
> software.  At least the two message IDs that begin with “mailman” are
> definitely fresh.  These pieces of software should *not* be making up
> fresh message IDs. 

Debbugs has nothing to do with these message IDs; it adds
Resent-Message-Id: for the messages which it forwards, and retains the
original Message-Id:. Most likely this is something to do with the
mailman list-to-news gateway.

Don Armstrong

-- 
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is
research.
 -- Steven Wright

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu