Mail-Followup-To (was Re: breaking long header lines into 2 (or more) lines)

Derek Martin invalid at pizzashack.org
Tue May 1 21:17:05 UTC 2018


On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 10:50:47AM -0700, Will Yardley wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 08:57:50AM -0700, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
> > 
> > I always thought $followup_to was a pretty nice feature.  While I
> > sympathize with Matthias, the mischief was the result of
> > misconfiguration, and Mutt requires nothing if not attention to the
> > documentation and configuration.

I agree strongly with this point.  Moreover, it's reasonable to
presume that anyone subscribed to this list uses Mutt (at least some
of the time), and as such have access to features that make good use
of the header.  So there's arguably at least some value in keeping it.

> > However, if there is a strong majority of mutt-users subscribers that
> > agree with $followup_to defaulting to 'no', I'll make the change.
> 
> I think it's a nice idea too, but the draft (which expired 20 years ago)
> never became a standard.
> 
> I'd argue that if one of Mutt's claims to fame is standards-compliance,
> dropping support for it or not defaulting it to on might be the better
> option.

I would (amiably!) argue that's nonsense, as illustrated by my
favorite anti-example of standards compliance:  The removal of tail
-[number] from the tail command.  It broke millions of shell scripts,
and the gnu binutils maintainers were essentially forced to put it
back in (albeit much too late for most people who were impacted),
despite it being deprecated by the standard.

The lesson should be this:  Standards compliance != removal of
additional useful features not specified by the standards. And as a
corollary, standards which forbid useful features without compelling
reason should be ignored.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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