Re: Change the expectation that emails should wrap at 80 characters

[Andrea Pappacoda]

Hi Henrik,

On Mon Mar 3, 2025 at 10:12 PM CET, Henrik Ahlgren wrote:

Soren Stoutner <so...@debian.org> writes:

All of the subsequent emails I have sent as part of this discussion have been wrapped at 80 characters inline with the current mailing list code of conduct.

If I'm not mistaken, your emails (at least this one I am replying to) utilize Format=Flowed (in the text/pain part) as outlined in RFC 2646.

No, he's not. Here's the relevant part of the raw message:

   [...]
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit
   From: Soren Stoutner <so...@debian.org>
   To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
   Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2025 13:38:16 -0700
   Message-ID: <2454349.8dm9x6sSvN@soren-desktop>
   Organization: Debian
   MIME-Version: 1.0

   Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
   Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
   [...]

This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --nextPart4248614.FYXLhVEQL0 As you can see, the Content-Type header has no Format parameter. Yeah, (decoded) lines end with ' ' (ASCII space), but with no Format parameter set to Flowed, they have no special meaning.

Nonetheless, the actual on-wire lines are under 80 characters, encoded with quoted-printable.

Just to be clear: this has nothing to do with Format=Flowed. The Content-Transfer-Encoding does not bind the Content-Type, nor vice versa.

F=F is a promising concept, but it can be surprisingly challenging to implement correctly, even when it seems trivial.

Is it? I wrote a simple flowed-to-html converter in something like 50 lines of C. It may not be sophisticated, but to me it seems to work as expected. As for composing, simple editors like Vim can produce compliant text with a one-line configuration option.

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