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Re: [Nmh-workers] Line wrapping in mhl

2012-01-26 13:37:53
I'm more of the opinion that mhl *should* do some basic line wrapping,
but with the option to instead invoke an external app that might be
able to do a better job. I don't have a massively strong objection to
not doing so, but it seems wrong to be shipping mhl in essentially a
broken state. I know we've been doing so since forever, but I'd like
the out of the box behaviour to be good, even if a bit of customization
to call external utilities could make it better.

Okay, I understand your point.  I'm just thinking ... ew, that code
is a mess, and I'm not crazy about making it worse.  Specifically,
the "line break" happens inside of uip/mhlsbr.c:putch().  The
decision to make the line break happens on a per-character basis
so reworking that all is going to be some digging.  I think I'm
going to have to invoke the "someone can gladly tackle that, as
long as it's not me" rule. :-)

Other people have asked about pulling par into nmh; that feels wrong to
me.  As Lyndon pointed out "more" isn't part of nmh either.  Calling
out to another program which already does this is more like the toolset
philosophy that makes MH powerful.

So what I'm thinking is twofold:

- An option to disable any kind of line breaking in mhl.
- An option to filter mhl content through a program.  I'm thinking maybe
  a flag like "format" and using a mh_profile entry called "formatproc".

Sounds good?

--Ken

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