On 02Nov2018 17:19, Patrick Shanahan <p...@opensuse.org> wrote:
* Ian Collier <ian.coll...@cs.ox.ac.uk> [11-02-18 14:20]:
On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 10:08:30AM -0700, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
> With these you answer "yes" to stop:
> abort_noattach
> abort_nosubject
> abort_unmodified
> postpone
The postpone question is special because both answers stop.
In fact, if you quit accidentally and get asked the question
"Postpone this message? ([yes]/no):" then what you should never
do is answer "no" on the grounds that you want to continue editing
the message instead of postponing it, because that will actually
discard the message.
yes, you *should* <ctrl><g>
to abort the questioned action
you cannot expect mutt to know what or when you make an unintended
action.
No, but you can and often should make the default answers to questions
(a) not throw data away and (b) more generally, not do harm.
On that basis: postpone should default to yes.
Now, on the premise of Heuer's Law:
If it can't be turned off, it's not a feature. - Karl Heuer
the settings of postpone and abort_noattach etc should constitute the
defaults, and mutt's _unconfigured_ state should set these to "do no
harm, lose no data" defaults.
My personal practice is that (a) defaults should do the least harm and
that (b) the default answer should be "no" or "false" consistently, and
options construed such that "no" or "false" means the safer choice.
As an example, when I write Python functions with optional Boolean
parameters, those parameters _always_ default to False, and the
parameter's name is so defined that False is the safer (or less weird,
when "safer" is less well defined) mode.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <c...@cskk.id.au>
