Re: recommended mail clients

Jaco Kroon
2005-12-26T18:30:39Z

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Lee Revell wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-12-26 at 12:09 -0600, Jason Munro wrote:
>
>>On 11:54:00 am 26 Dec 2005 Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com> wrote:
>>
>><snip>
>>
>>>> Dare I say it, KMail has also been doing the Right Thing for a
>>>> long time. It will only line wrap things that you insert by
>>>> typing; pastes are left untouched.
>>>
>>>It seems that of all the popular mail clients only Thunderbird has
>>>this problem. AFAICT it's impossible to make it DTRT with inline
>>>patches and even if it is the fact that most users get it wrong
>>>points to a serious usability/UI issue.
>>>
>>>Would a patch to add "Don't use Thunderbird/Mozilla Mail" to
>>>SubmittingPatches be accepted? Then we can point the Mozilla
>>>developers at it (they have shown zero interest in fixing the problem
>>>so far) and hopefully this will light a fire under someone.

I would second that patch.

>>Maybe this is a stupid question but in terms of inline patches what exactly
>>would be ideal behavior from a mail client for LKML patch submitters? What
>>line lengths are expected to be maintained, preferred encodings, tabs vs.
>>spaces, etc? I have noticed that some patch submitters append an EOF after
>>the patch, while others do not. Would the ability to pull the patch from
>>the message body (assuming there was an agreed upon patch termination
>>string) as a separate file/download be useful? Though my client is web
>>based it is quite speedy and can handle large folders as well as many
>>desktop clients IMHO. I would gladly implement specific features to make
>>patch submission for LKML compliant.
>
>
> The specifics do not matter. It does not even have to do what we want
> by default when you paste or insert text. There just has to be SOME way
> (well, some reasonable way - a global config option is not reasonable)
> to insert a text file and paste from the clipboard as-is, no tab->space
> conversion, no line wrapping, nothing.

And mozilla only does the line-wrapping (with no way that I can find to
switch it off). It doesn't do tab->space conversion, that usually (in
my experience) results from c&p'ing from an [axe]term which outputs
spaces instead of tabs to begin with (well, it does represent a
character matrix so I don't really see another way).

Ideally (imho) one would like the 'changelog' part to be line-wrapped
(to keep it from running into oblivion) but the patch part to be left
"as is". There is also the [PATCH] subject prefix and signed-of-by
requirements. The only other recommendation (that I recall) is that the
changelog and the patch be seperated by '---' - but since this is part
of the initial output of the diff command this is done implicitly.

I've looked at a few clients and it seems I'm stuck with mozilla for at
least a while. Whilst probably the buggiest client there is it does
look like it's the best suited for what I want. I might switch to
FireFox (which iirc does have an "insert file" feature - which might
also solve this problem).

For the moment though I'm quickly hacking together a bash script that
wraps the sendmail binary that can be used specifically for submitting
patches (the intent is to perform certain checks for Signed-of-by lines,
correct [PATCH] subject and so forth). If anybody else is interrested
I'd be more than happy to share (albeit I suspect the usefullness will
be seriously limited).

Jaco
--
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world,
those that understand binary and those that don't.
http://www.kroon.co.za/

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