Re: UNIX kernel notification system

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> [Do you really mean to use paragraph-length lines?  I'd suggest
>> against it; they impair readability significantly, at least for me.
>> Manually rewrapped in the quotes below.]
> less(1) (or more(1)) doesn't take care of you?

Maybe; see below.

> The nice thing about such formatting is that the text can be wrapped
> at relatively arbitrary word boundaries, making it more readably
> displayable on a wider range of display widths (e.g. mobile phones,
> tablets).

That would have been true if the mail were marked format=flowed, which
yours wasn't.  Since it wasn't, the UA has to assume that that single
long line is supposed to be a single long line, and rewrapping it
arbitrarily is wrong.

Actually, my software deals with it moderately poorly.  Depending on
exactly which piece is handling the text in question, it either wraps
with no regard to word boundaries or truncates - I'm not sure whether
this counts as "tak[ing] care of it for [me]" or not.

When mail displays uglily because my software doesn't know how to
interpret correctly-marked mail, I don't mention it - but when the mail
isn't marked as rewrappable, it is hardly a UA fault to not rewrap it.

Again, I'll be manually repairing the damage for purposes of this email.

>> What about embedded?  [...]
>> What about machines with multiple keyboard/screen heads [...]
> I'd argue that embedded is a degenerate case of "lights-out", [...]

Certainly defensible.

> The multi-bottle+keyboard (& possibly mouse, though last we met,
> there was only one of you ...) is arguably the standard multi-user
> timesharing system set up, with a little more complicated "terminal"

Hm.

I think I agree.

> The handling could even be "look up the appropriate language for this
> message to match what the users of this system know how to read",
> e.g. catgets(3) in NLS message catalogs.  See?  i18n handled!

I think it's more like "i18n handwaved", but never mind.

> (OK, except for the translation part, but I'll put on an MIT X11 hat
> here and say, "mechanism, not policy!")

Agreed.  For unclassified text messages, I think just passing the text
message to userland (for display, translation, ignoring, checking
against admin-configured swatch-style patterns, whatever) is about as
good as we're likely to get.

/dev/log basically _is_ that answer, though; that part's already done.

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