Re: [Nmh-workers] date math

[Ken Hornstein]

>That's fine, but there actually is a wrong answer - and that's losing
>info with no easy way to recover it.

Sigh.  My point is that the information is not "lost" ... it's still
there!  We just choose not to display it!  Users can still get it if
they want!  It's just that it seems like a majority of people don't want
it.  The default should reflect that.

>The recipient's local time is
>always possible to compute from the original Date header (that's
>what the proposal is that nmh do) - and obviously can be done by the
>recipient manually.  The sender's timezone however is only in the Date
>header (when it isn't just sent in UTC for no good reason) and if nmh
>hides it, it is unrecoverable (without fiddling format files or looking
>at the raw message.)

Yeah, but it seems like a majority of people don't want (or care) about
the sender's timezone.  Or maybe they'd be happy with displaying both.
But it seems pretty clear that the current default, displaying only
the sender's timezone, is lousy.  Really, it seems more a matter of
taste than something that can be argued from an absolute position.
Somebody is going to have to fiddle with format files to get what they
want; the only decision at this point is who that will be.

If it was just young punks like me and Eric Gillespie, okay, fine, you'd
have greybeard weight on your side.  But Norm and Ralph are also fans
of "All Local, All of the Time!".  Literally, Norm has been around since
the beginning.  Yes, you've got Paul Vixie and Lyndon in the "Local Zone,
Hell No!" camp.  Perhaps we'd need to run some weighted voting scheme
based on number of years of nmh/MH experience (maybe every year you've
used MH/nmh as your MUA, you get one vote?).  Okay, not really serious
about that one.

>Also not all that important - just avoids people asking why the time is
>there twice (which that wouldn't do if the times are different).

Well, I was trying to think about changes that would make sense to
new users, and would cut down on questions.

But I've gotten enough pushback that maybe I'm not as convinced as
I was earlier.  So let's put this in "still thinking about it" column.
Still interested in feedback.  We'd need some new format instructions
if we really wanted to do the "display both dates" format, but that's
not that hard I think.

--Ken