Re: RFA: Building GDB under GLIBC 2.8

[Paul Pluzhnikov <ppluzhnikov@google.com>]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:07:29 -0800
>> From: "Jim Blandy" <jimb@red-bean.com>
>>
>> > Jim, could you please try sending diffs such that they are readable in
>> > a text-based mail reader?
>>
>> I'm afraid gmail will mangle them if I don't include them as
>> attachments.

Gmail will actually do text/plain attachment with 7-bit encoding
if the attached filename ends in .txt

However, it appears that there is some other message rewriting
happening elsewhere, because my messages with text/plain/7-bit
attachments end up as text/plain/base64 by the time they reach
sourceware.org :-(

>> MIME attachments have been in widespread use for a very
>> long time; does your mail reader have difficulty displaying them?
>
> Ugh, web-based email.  I keep wondering how people can write anything
> but three-line mails with those.  I must be getting old...

There is an "It's all text" firefox plugin, which makes editing
the messages with a real editor easy. Unfortunately, whitespace
and line wrapping are still a problem.

> Anyway, I use emacs's rmail to read my mail.  Have been for years, and
> for me being able to have my mail inside my editor is fairly
> essential.  Rmail isn't MIME-aware, which is great.  I don't get to
> see most of the random crap that uneducated computer users attach to
> their mails.  And if I really want to look at it, there's etach wich
> detaches MIME attachments from my mail and saves them as a file.
>
> Detaching attachments is fine for most things, but it is really
> annoying for reviewing patches, since in many cases you want to make
> remarks about particular lines of a patch, whcih is best done in line.

Surely you can open the detached attachment in another buffer and
cut/paste the lines you want to comment on back into the reply?

> This is the reason why we used to have the (unwritten?) rule that
> patches were supposed to be sent inline using a mail client that
> didn't muck with the contents of the mail message.

Yes, I would very much like such a client. For a long time I've
used emacs VM mode, but there are several features of Gmail which
I do not know how to emulate in emacs-VM, so it isn't really
feasible for me to switch back to emacs :(

Base64 attachments appear not to cause too much trouble in this
list (you are the only one who complained recently), although
they are not tolerated in glibc lists.

Cheers,
-- 
Paul Pluzhnikov