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Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 12:58:02 +0100
From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@pobox.com>
To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org
Subject: Sequencing of messages in mailing list archives
Message-ID: <20010422125802.A11835@linnet.org>
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When you try to read a mailing list archive in 'subject' order, the messages
appear to be in an arbitrary order in the index (most noticeably, the first
posting in the thread is often in the middle). For example see:
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mailindex.cgi?sort=subject&file=archive/2001/freebsd-stable/20010422.freebsd-stable

and have a look at the thread "Found a typo...". It does not seem to be
sorting either in date order, or by following message threads. I have tried
manually unpicking this thread, and here's what you get, showing the
messages in the same order as the list archive:

(1)Re: Found a typo...	Tue, 17 Apr 2001 01:50:40 +0200		(Mon 2350Z)
			In-Reply-To: (4)
			References: (2), (4)

(2) Re: Found a typo...	Mon, 16 Apr 2001 23:15:01 +0200		(Mon 2115Z)
			In-Reply-To: (3)

(3) Found a typo...	Mon, 16 Apr 2001 11:37:56 -0500		(Mon 1637Z)

(4) Re: Found a typo...	Mon, 16 Apr 2001 16:10:03 -0700		(Mon 2310Z)
			In-Reply-To: (2)

(5) Re: Found a typo...	Tue, 17 Apr 2001 11:34:43 +0200		(Tue 0935Z)
			In-Reply-To: (4)
			References: (2), (4)

(6) Re: Found a typo...	Fri, 20 Apr 2001 00:12:02 +0200		(Thu 2212Z)
			In-Reply-To: (7)
			References: (5), (7)

(7) Re: Found a typo...	Thu, 19 Apr 2001 05:45:51 -0700		(Thu 1245Z)
			In-Reply-To: (5)

The natural order by In-Reply-To: should be  3  2  4  1  5  7  6
(or 5 1 instead of 1 5, but date disambiguates)

Sorting by date also gives the same order.

This makes it very tricky to follow a thread using the index... so it would
be nice if this could be fixed.

Thanks,

Brian.

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