Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] SubmittingPatches: remove pine-specific hints from MUA hints

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 May 2021 09:50:21 +0200

On Wed, May 12 2021, Dave Huseby wrote:

> On 12.05.2021 10:45, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>>There hasn't been a release of Pine since late 2005, in Alpine the
>>no-strip-whitespace-before-send switch is already the default.
>>
>>This documentation was initially added in 9740d289ee7 (Update
>>SubmittingPatches to add MUA specific notes., 2005-08-26), at this
>>point it's safe to say that it's not useful to anyone anymore, let's
>>remove it.
>
> What is wrong with keeping it in there? My latest version of the
> etiquette patch moves my Mutt MUA config notes to this section on MUAs.
> It could eventually become a somewhat exhaustive reference of MUA
> tweaks. Old tools may not be popular but they sometime have niche uses
> and/or userbases. My recent switch to Mutt has been mixed at best and I
> went back to take a look at mh/nmh to see if I liked it better and I may
> give it a go for a while to kick the tires, likely making me the only
> developer that uses nmh.
>
> Keeping these notes on old tools--at the bottom of documentation no
> less--seems to have little to no "cruft cost" with the potential of
> helping somebody someday, even if nostalgia is the only reason.

I think there's an inherent value in keeping guides like these short and
to the point, and only including those things relevant to most readers.

So I do think that if we're including such a niche guide we're better
off splitting it into another file and linking to it, same with the
whole guide in SubmittingPatches now teaching people to manually craft a
patch without using git-format-patch, another obscure edge case we give
too much space / causes distraction.

In this case though I think saying anything about pine crosses the line
from niche to obscure archaeology. We're inlining a patch for abandoned
software that has a replacement. If we're going to say anything about
Pine in such a list I think it should be:

    Pine: abandoned and has known flowed text bugs, use its successor
    alpine or another MUA instead.