[Wine] Bug 13517: Forums breaking mailing list

[Kari Hurtta]

"L. Rahyen" <research at science.su> writes in gmane.comp.emulators.wine.user:

> On Wednesday July 2 2008 23:18:23 Zachary Goldberg wrote:
> > Finally: I move that we close this thread.  If there is still residual
> > discomfort about the few cosmetic issues surrounding the gateway would
> > any party willing to put fourth the work to fix the problem without
> > replacing the whole system start a new thread with their ideas?
> 
> 	Personally I think this is what should be done if these cosmetic issues are 
> so minor that no one wants to actually fix them (yet):
> 
> 	1) Report a bug about not perfect headers to the developers of the 
> gateway (not to Wine' Bugzilla because we don't have a developer for this 
> yet). Of course with clear explanation about what the problem is, what is the 
> difference between expected and current behavior, etc. They are more likely 
> to have a developer who will fix this.

> 	2) What about "too long lines" problem this isn't even a bug in the gateway - 
> it is a bug in the mail client if it can't display such messages properly 
> (most of e-mail clients don't have such problem). BTW, it is legitimate to 
> send messages by e-mail without forced line wrapping (and sometimes even 
> preferred - for example if you sending a message to wine-patches with a patch 
> in the body). If someone thinks we should care about this compatibility issue 
> with broken clients - it is good idea first to ask site admin: perhaps there 
> is already an option in the gateway to preprocess messages with standard 
> Linux command like fmt in order to force line wrapping for broken clients. If 
> there is no such option yet - post a feature request to the developers of the 
> gateway. There is some caveats however - for example, if forum user post a 
> backtrace or terminal output it might be wrapped and this is bad. Therefore 
> personally I think that this issue should be fixed on client side and has 
> nothing to do with the gateway. If someone think otherwise please discuss 
> this with site admin - only he decides is such a change acceptable or not.
> 


Content-type: text/plain 
   is _not_ supposed to rewrapped.

That is preformatted type.



What you want is
 
Content-type: text/plain; format=flowed



That format is supposed to reflowed/reformated before display.


See RFC 3676                The Text/Plain Format and DelSp Parameters         

But note also what it says:

---------------------------------------------
4.2.  Generating Format=Flowed

   When generating Format=Flowed text, lines SHOULD be 78 characters or
   shorter, including any trailing white space and also including any
   space added as part of stuffing (see Section 4.4).  As suggested
   values, any paragraph longer than 78 characters in total length could
   be wrapped using lines of 72 or fewer characters.  While the specific
   line length used is a matter of aesthetics and preference, longer
   lines are more likely to require rewrapping and to encounter
   difficulties with older mailers.  (It has been suggested that 66
   character lines are the most readable.)

   The restriction to 78 or fewer characters between CRLFs on the wire
   is to conform to [MSG-FMT].

   (In addition to conformance to [MSG-FMT], there is a historical need
   that all lines, even when displayed by a non-flowed-aware program,
   will fit in a standard 79- or 80-column screen without having to be
   wrapped.  The limit is 78, not 79 or 80, because while 79 or 80 fit
   on a line, the last column is often reserved for a line-wrap
   indicator.)

   When creating flowed text, the generating agent wraps, that is,
   inserts 'soft' line breaks as needed.  Soft line breaks are added at
   natural wrapping points, such as between words.  A soft line break is
   a SP CRLF sequence.

   There are two techniques for inserting soft line breaks.  The older
   technique, established by RFC 2646, creates a soft line break by
   inserting a CRLF after the occurrence of a space.  With this
   technique, soft line breaks are only possible where spaces already
   occur.  When this technique is used, the DelSp parameter SHOULD be
   used; if used it MUST be set to "no".

....
------------------------------------------------------------



> 	To me it seems that developers of the gateway might be even not aware yet 
> about issue #1 - most people (possibly including developers of the gateway) 
> simply will not notice it.
> 	I'm noticing it and don't like it but it isn't big annoyance for me because 
> as I said before I don't have any trouble understanding messages from forum 
> users.
> 
> 	If someone find enough free time to report a bug to the developers of the 
> gateway about issue #1 - please post a link to it here.

/ Kari Hurtta