libbb/create_icmp6.socket.c: why is entire code conditional?

[Rob Landley]

A: Because people don't read that way.

Q: Why is top posting bad?

On Sunday 26 March 2006 1:56 pm, Jason Schoon wrote:
> On 3/26/06, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at mindspring.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Jason Schoon wrote:
> > > On 3/26/06, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at mindspring.com> wrote:
> > > > (can we avoid top posting, please?)
> > >
> > > Why?  That's how my mail client defaults, is there some reason it is
> > > wrong?
> >
> > yes.  and you should do what it takes to override the behaviour of
> > your mail client to stop it from doing that.
>
> Okay, what is that reason exactly?  You have just stated that in your
> opinion it is wrong.  Have you seen a mailing list or universal Internet
> email formatting guideline that specifies that replies must be on the
> bottom (buried under potentially tons of replies)?

The business community (managers, lawyers, editors...) uses top-posting 
because they've been stapling their reply to the front of the previous stack 
of memos and throwing it in a physical "in box" for over a hundred years.  
(Post-it-notes were a godsend to this crowd.)  When dealing with actual 
printed inter-office memos, interleaving would require scissors and tape.  
They didn't change how they worked when they computerized.

Computer geeks have been interleaving replies with the original message since 
the days of 110 baud acoustic couplers when chopping five lines out of the 
message made a noticeable difference to transmission times.  We were 
computerized since day 1, and when you have a text editor this is really easy 
to do.

In part it's a cultural thing.  When you top post you say "culturally, I am a 
manager, not a coder".  (In which case why are you on this list?)  And in 
part it's because _mixing_ the two is an oil and water thing.  But mostly 
it's because putting the answer before the question is not the way people 
think or read.

I top post when responding to management types who top post, but we have asked 
you to _not_ do so here.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.