On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 11:04:57AM +0200, Eike Rathke wrote: > Well, I think removing the $locale variable was a stupid change ;-) > Whether to add $attribution_locale I don't really care, fine for me > as long as $locale is an alias for $attribution_locale.
Aliases are bad. They make the code needlessly more complex, and can
lead to confusion when things don't quite work as expected. As I said
originally, if we're keeping both, adding the new variable is worse
than just leaving locale but fixing the bug.
> Also the change to not switch back and forth the locale for LC_TIME
> is good. But making $locale a) not work, and b) complain everytime
> a hook uses it is ugly and unnecessary.
This, FWIW, was my original complaint about the change. But it has
two nice side effects:
1. It clarifies the purpose of the variable... $locale seems to imply
that it is for setting the global locale, and that confusion (I
think) is why it took so long to notice that this was broken.
Everyone whose locale was not en_US or compatible was setting it.
But that was never meant to be necessary, and should not be.
2. Many sites on the internet do suggest changing $locale if your
language is not en_US, and this is a misuse of the setting that
can have bad side effects and cause confusion. The change makes
it clear that this is generally The Wrong Thing™.
With the new behavior, it's clear that the ONLY reason to set this is
if you want to change the dates in your attributions. In every other
case, you should (and now must) configure your operating system
properly to get what you want. This is The Right Thing™. My only
nitpick is the new variable name is too long. ;-)
The new setting is clearly unnecessary, except for the send-hook case.
If you're already using it there, it's a simple matter to:
sed 's/locale/attribution_locale/g'
Or something similar. This should take you all of about 10s to fix,
permanently, so this argument is pretty bogus.
> Since $locale always only worked in LC_TIME context and defaulted to 'C'
> regardless of the users' environment, users who cared set it to their
> locale,
But this is senseless. Just set your locale properly at the OS level
and the setting is superfluous. The average user should never even
need to know this setting exists. Most users will be able to (and
should) remove it from their config entirely.
> But forcing the pile of existing muttrc reply-hook "~f '...'" 'set
> locale="..."; set attribution="..."' to change is awkward,
> especially if the same configuration is used on several machines of
> which some run mutt tip and some don't.
This, by itself, is never a good reason to avoid making an otherwise
justifiable change. Old stuff breaks when you cross major milestones.
That's a fact of continued development. If you don't want old stuff
to break, don't run new code.
Though, it might be nice if Mutt could execute config conditionally
based on its version...
Ultimately, all this is why I changed my mind and agreed with Kevin's
change.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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