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Re: Wrapping long lines (Was Re: FAQ update suggestion for "I'm having basic problems with find. Why?")
On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 09:18:30AM -0700, Eduardo Chappa wrote:
>*** Christopher Faylor (ufocgf-no-personal-reply-please@cygwin.com.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
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