On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Daniel Shahaf <d...@daniel.shahaf.name> wrote: > Top-posting is appropriate for short responses that address the entirety of > the replied message.
Where does it say that? I'm looking at the guidelines at http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/branches/1.4.x/www/mailing-list-guidelines.html, which include no such caveat. Admittedly, they also say that I should not reflexively chide people for it, and I didn't think I did so reflexively, but would welcome your opinion on the matter. That sort of unstated exception is actually a problem for source control, especially when used for QA. The guidelines for all sorts of practices like backup and branching and regression testing are often silently ignored in the field, because "we didn't need to say that" or "this makes more sense" or one of my favorites from a conversation last year, "just read the code". And then you don't know what actually happened or what was done, which is anathema to source control or testing environments.
