Re: hpn_buffer_size

[Chuck Swiger <cswiger%mac.com@localhost>]

On Apr 27, 2012, at 11:43 PM, Mouse wrote:
[ ... ]
> Quoting from that (with long-line damage manually repaired)...
> 
>> $WORK obligates me to use a MUA which supports i18n well, by which I
>> don't mean UTF-8 and ISO-Latin-1, but various UTF-16 encodings like
>> Big5/GBK and ISO-2022-JP.  Unfortunately, Mail.app no longer
>> implements the format=flowed MIME Content-type.
> 
> Then I suggest you switch to some other user agent for non-$WORK mail,
> or, if your job involves writing to these lists, external-to-$WORK work
> mail.  Or at least insert a line break every 70 characters or so.

It's simply not practical for me to switch MUAs, most of the time.

Nothing in my job involves writing to NetBSD mailing lists:
I'm a network administrator, not in Apple Developer Relations.

And yes, if I make a point of it, I can manually wrap text.

> Using paragraph-length lines for running text substantially impairs its
> readability for many people (especially on the more technical lists,
> where rewrapping text not marked as rewrappable severely mangles things
> like quoted dmesg output).

You're not saying anything here which I don't already know.

Fifteen or so years ago, I used to do GNKSA reviews:

  http://www.newsreaders.com/gnksa/gnksa.txt

"14) Try to respect the 80-character line-length conventions

Any line breaks shown to the user while she is editing her article
SHOULD still be present when the article is actually posted to the Net.
The software SHOULD NOT show the user four 75-character lines while
actually posting a single 300-character line.  Nor should it show the
user a series of 100-character lines while actually posting alternating
lines of 80 and 20 characters each."

...and I'm pretty sure I've got bug reports against email systems at CMU
which are old enough to drink legally.

>> Feel free to file your own bug reports with Apple [...]
> 
> I am no customer of theirs and am not likely to be; they have no reason
> to pay any attention whatsoever to me.  I have no idea how to go about
> filing a bug report with Apple and see no reason to learn, especially
> since I expect it would involve things I am not willing to do (such as
> giving them a nontrivial amount of information about myself that is not
> relevant to the bug).  In any case, I see no reason *I* should go to
> any trouble to make up for *your* not only choosing to use an MTA which
> doesn't know how to use perfectly good applicable standards, but then,
> apparently, being unwilling to even do your readers the courtesy of
> typing one extra keystroke every 70 or so to make your text more
> readable.

For all these words you've written in response to a year-old archive link,
your actual point is unclear.

Filing a bug report with Apple involves roughly the same level of effort
and information disclosure that filing a bug report with Bugzilla against
Thunderbird or filing a PR with NetBSD entails.

I'm pretty sure that's not a relevant point, though-- if you don't want to
read messages from me, hit spacebar, or set up a From: filter.  Yet, I
suspect that's also aside from the point.  

So, why such eloquent histrionic outrage about a minor matter?

[ Talk about a first-world problem.  Well, some folks would complain just
because their TV remote was out of reach, yet such folks don't even recognize
just how fortunate they are to not comprehend what a real problem actually is.
Just for the record, my definition of a real problem involves learning what
happens when thousands of people burn to death. ]

>> Alternatively, one could leap ahead and use a 21st-century MUA which
>> wraps text.
> 
> When it's not marked as mecahnically rewrappable?  In the presence of a
> perfectly good spec for doing such marking?  That would be - "is",
> perhaps I should say, since you imply some do do it - a bug, regardless
> of century.  (Well, absent specific configuration to the contrary, I
> suppose.)

Here's a decade-old unfixed bug against Mozilla Thunderbird with regard to
format=flowed:

  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199776

I suspect that describing f=f as a "perfectly good spec" is somewhere between
an optimistic perspective and a rhetorical position held for the sake of 
arguing.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck