[bug #43239] broken interaction between line numbering and diversions

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #43239 (project groff):

[comment #2 comment #2:]
> As long as Branden is going through and updating crusty old bugs, to make
the record of this one complete I'll point out that further discussion did
occur on the email list; http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2014-09/msg00188.html is
the start of the relevant thread.
> 
> Spoiler alert: all who responded agreed with Werner's assessment in comment
#1.

Yeah, have to say that I agree with that.  A line number is "attached" to the
output line, and goes where the output line goes.

Can that make line numbering discontiguous?  Absolutely.  But it's up to a
document or macro package to provide a facility to manage line numbering
correctly in combination with footnotes, for instance.

> (The archived thread shows two instances of "Message not available," but I
believe this to be inaccurate: comparison against my email archive shows that
the thread on the web archive is complete.)

This might be due to the existence of off-list replies.  I suspect what's
happening is that the web interface reports "message not available" for any
Message-Id (appearing in a References header) that it doesn't know about. 
Mail user agents (MUAs) can preserve in that header every Message-Id in what
it thinks of as the "thread", which can lead to a multiplicity of histories
when off-list replies come into the mix.

There's probably an RFC about this, but I would think, off the top of my head,
that a References: line need only contain the Message-Ids of messages actually
quoted in the mail.  On the other hand, the References header is usually
populated at the moment a reply message is sent to the editor for composition,
and the MUA has no way of reliably discerning what remains of the quoted
material and its association back to source messages subsequent to the tender
mercies of text editing.

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