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Re: stuff_all_quoted



On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 05:52:10PM -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 01:43:24PM -0700, William Yardley wrote:

> > so to put it differently, does anyone have any reason why Gary Johnson's
> > "stuff_all_quoted" patch should *not* be included (and, possibly even
> > made the default)?
 
> I don't, but I do think the name of the variable is awful.  It doesn't
> seem to convey any idea of what it does, and sounds kind of, er,
> juvenile.  As in, "I got stuff all quoted," or something of the sort.
> Maybe we can call it all_your_quoted_stuff_are_belong_to_us? ;-)

Sure - the name doesn't matter at all to me (and I doubt it does to Gary
either).
 
> In all seriousness, I'd like to suggest pad_flowed_quotes as a more
> intuitive natural English name for the variable.

That sounds fine to me. 

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 06:15:25PM -0400, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 16 at 01:43 PM, quoth William Yardley:

> > Since almost all editors used by mutt users do *not* support
> > generation of flowed text, I think it makes sense to (by default)
> > display and quote flowed messages in a way that is consistent with
> > other messages received by mutt.
 
> Almost all? What, is vim the only one that can?

I'm honestly not convinced that vim can *properly* generate flowed text.
I've only messed around with it a very little, but I think there is some
stuff that really should happen when the message is sent, and not
before. I'm wondering if it would be possible / desirable to let mutt
handle some of this, though I'm not sure if there's a reasonable way to
do that since mutt isn't its own editor.

I'm not an expert, but I think this kind of thing is harder to
accomplish when the editor and MUA are two different things, since
there's certain stuff that's a lot easier to verify / set correctly
right before the message is sent.

Without going through all of rfc2646....
(http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2646.html)

   A generating agent SHOULD:

      1.  Ensure all lines (fixed and flowed) are 79 characters or
          fewer in length, counting the trailing space but not
          counting the CRLF, unless a word by itself exceeds 79
          characters.
      2.  Trim spaces before user-inserted hard line breaks.
      3.  Space-stuff lines which start with a space, "From ", or
          ">".

Can Vim handle all of these requirements reliably? I can think of a lot
of scenarios where the user could pretty easily accidentally cause vim
to generate bogus flowed text, causing a lot of problems. Honestly, I
have given a quick try to "fo+=w" in vim, and it doesn't really seem to
do anything special.

I'm not aware of any way to generate flowed text with emacs, jed, pico,
nano, or other common editors people use with mutt, though someone
please let me know if I'm wrong.

FWIW, Pine does support flowed text (in the 4.6x versions), though I
don't think there's a way to use Pico to generate flowed text when not
using Pine.

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 06:25:01PM -0400, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 16 at 06:15 PM, quoth Kyle Wheeler:
> > On Wednesday, August 16 at 01:43 PM, quoth William Yardley:

> > My only objection is that it doesn't work for me. When I reply to 
> > format-flowed emails, I get >text regardless of the setting of 
> > $stuff_all_quoted. Then again, I get that regardless of whether the 
> > message I'm replying to is format-flowed or not.
 
> Ehrm, I spoke too soon. Here's what really happens:
> 
> Setting text_flowed causes $indent_string to be ignored. Because 
> $indent_string is ignored, replying to NON format=flowed messages 
> causes them to be quoted like so: >text. But because of this patch, 
> replying to the rare emails that ARE format=flowed does work properly.
> 
> So really, my objection is that this patch introduces a behavior 
> inconsistency when used by someone who has $text_flowed set. Without 
> this patch, *all* replies are of the form >text when $text_flowed is 
> set, but with it, normal emails are "broken" and only format=flowed 
> messages are handled properly.

I can reproduce this. So yeah - text should be quoted as:

>> foo
rather than
>>foo
in *either* case when $text_flowed is set.

FWIW, >> foo and > foo are equivalent, but > > foo means a quote of
depth one with a content of "> foo".
(from section 4.5).

In any event, the behavior you're describing isn't broken - just
inconsistent -- and should be easy to fix (if Gary's not on the list, I
can ping him and see if he's willing to take a look at it).

I *personally* am most interested in the following two scenarios:

1) Display of flowed text within mutt's pager. I think this is a
no-brainer, since one of the big points of having flowed text is that
you can display the quoted material differently from how it's actually
encoded in the raw message.

In fact, it might be cool to even have an option to display (but not
quote) flowed text with a solid bar like in Thunderbird / Mozilla,
something like:

| | Foo Bar adsfwejasdfasdfasdf asdfk erdafd some text here and this is
| | quoted
|
| this is a second level quote here.... blah blah blah and now I'm going
| to the next line

and maybe even have an option to have it actually reformat itself to fit
the terminal width. But I'm getting carried away....

2) Quoting messages that are format=flowed when $text_flowed is unset.

But I think it would be good to fix the behavior described above as
well.

w