Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe: <mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive: <http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post: <mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help: <mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sourceware.org/ml/#faqs>
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 12:38:09 -0400
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Wrapping long lines (Was Re: FAQ update suggestion for "I'm having basic problems with find. Why?")
Message-ID: <20040709163809.GB5602@trixie.casa.cgf.cx>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
References: <010701c464f4$398e2030$4e6510ac AT ds DOT tao DOT co DOT uk> <Pine DOT GSO DOT 4 DOT 58 DOT 0407081027371 DOT 11665 AT slinky DOT cs DOT nyu DOT edu> <013301c464fe$e2e425d0$4e6510ac AT ds DOT tao DOT co DOT uk> <Pine DOT GSO DOT 4 DOT 58 DOT 0407081124080 DOT 11665 AT slinky DOT cs DOT nyu DOT edu> <00aa01c4659f$662717e0$4e6510ac AT ds DOT tao DOT co DOT uk> <20040709153850 DOT GE3525 AT trixie DOT casa DOT cgf DOT cx> <Pine DOT LNX DOT 4 DOT 60 DOT 0407090907230 DOT 2854 AT zeno1 DOT math DOT washington DOT edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.60.0407090907230.2854@zeno1.math.washington.edu>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i

On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 09:18:30AM -0700, Eduardo Chappa wrote:
>*** Christopher Faylor (ufocgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com DOT tv)...:
>
>:) On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 11:27:55AM +0100, William Blunn wrote:
>:) >I have set up several web-based systems which do this, and it wasn't 
>:) >hard.
>:) 
>:) >On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 06:26:27PM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>:) >>Finally, you (Igor) are right that we are not going to change the 
>:) >>sourceware.org software to wrap in any other fashion than it does 
>:) >>now.
>:) 
>:) sourceware.org, the home of cygwin.com, is a technical site.  The 
>:) mailing lists that it sponsors are for technical discussions.
>:) 
>:) In these discussions, the formatting of messages could conceivably 
>:) actually *mean something*.  It's entirely possible that someone meant 
>:) to use 997 characters in one of the lines of their message to 
>:) illustrate a point or even to provide a patch.
>
>If someone sends a 997 characters line, I will see it wrapped in my e-mail 
>program, 12 times wrapped. It will not be cut at the width of the screen. 
>That's very helpful in my opinion.

Maybe you're being purposely obtuse.  I don't know.  My point was that if
I send specially formatted text in my messages to a technical mailing list
I don't want the archiving software to unformat it for me.  What it does
to the email reader on your PDA is irrelevant.

>If someone provides a patch and I were to cut and paste that patch, I 
>would call myself crazy, I would normally save the patch to a file 
>directly, so this is not an issue.

The issue is inspecting the patch in the archives.  If you have to
puzzle out where the line breaks actually occur because your web browser
is helpfully wrapping things for you, then the utility of the archives
has been diminished for some people (like me).

>On the other hand, just to mention something, instead of saying "NO, it 
>won't happen", maybe you may want to experiment on adding <BR> at the end 
>of each line, or adding <P> instead of having empty lines, or things like 
>that. Probably does not work out of the box, but it probably can be tuned
>to fit most messages, if not all.

That's sort of presumptuous, don't you think?  You don't even know how
the archives are generated but you have no qualms about suggesting that
I take my time trying to "fix" something which I've already indicated is
not broken.  Again, I am not going to spend any time trying to set up
the cygwin mailing list as a special case.  There are surely other sites
archiving the mailing list out there somewhere.  Use one of them if the
formatting in the sourceware.org archive offends you.

OTOH, if anyone wants to change the policy of sourceware.org, you are
welcome to send email to the overseers mailing list and lobby for
change.  I don't think you are going to find a receptive audience, but I
could be wrong.

cgf

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/