Re: UNIX kernel notification system

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Mon, 3 Oct 2011 11:31:17 -0700
Erik Fair <fair%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> less(1) (or more(1)) doesn't take care of you? 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). Just as all the world's not a VAX 
> (cried the PDP-11 users), so also is the world rather more than just 80 by 24.

Sorry to have to add anything to this off-topic discussion;

One issue is that a message may a mix of text to be wrapped and text to
be left as-is (code for instance), so every paragraph/line must be able
to be auto-wrap annotated.  Of course there is the possibility of HTML
mail (with its own issues) and multiple MIME parts, but it's
traditionally fine on tech lists to mix code and text inline, with the
only exceptions that I see being in Apple Mail posts.

Another issue is that readers that will wrap such paragraphs don't
usually have a configuration option to specify the width of auto-flowed
paragraphs, so for instance in the client I use (a GTK2 client), those
paragraphs extend far right until the end of the window (which means
much more than 80 columns), so reading them is unfortunately harder.

But, with the recent proliferation of Apple Mail posts on the mailing
lists I try to throttle my complaints about it (my last one being
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-userlevel/2010/10/30/msg004119.html :)
-- 
Matt