Re: [PATCH] emacs: PATCH [1/2] mail user agent

["Tory S. Anderson" <webdev@toryanderson.com>]

I'm coming from very limited experience here -- gnus is the only MUA I've used -- but I'd be surprised if it's common practice to hijack a setting to set the MUA to something.

As far as ripping the bandage off, I've followed that strategy many times in my professional life, but have come to dislike it; I'm in line with the Clojure paradigm to never break stuff. Sometimes that means namespacing, but in this case putting in the var with a default to preserve reverse compatibility is an easy thing, if a little kludgy. "Why was it ever doing this?" is a legitimate question, and it's no skin off my back if we simply chopped it out. But for a program as old and well-used as Notmuch, I would hate to break something that many users may not even realize they depended upon.

Isn't it a good idea to make the fix available for those who want it, but non-breaking for those who have no idea?

I suppose the docstring could be improved, and some options provided for those who don't know their MUAs. Trouble with options is, I don't know them, either -- only the notmuch MUA and 'gnus-user-agent. I'm not sure about others like mutt or muse or wanderlust or anything else. I'm not even sure if all of those have MUAs...

- Tory

Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi> writes:

> On Sat, May 22 2021, David Bremner wrote:
>
>> webdev@toryanderson.com (Tory S. Anderson) writes:
>>
>>>  
>>> +(defcustom notmuch-mail-user-agent 'notmuch-user-agent
>>> +  "The mail user-agent to use when creating mail after using Notmuch. For historical purposes, the default is 'notmuch-user-agent"
>>> +  :group 'notmuch)
>>>  ;;; Mime Utilities
>>>  
>>>  (defun notmuch-foreach-mime-part (function mm-handle)
>>> @@ -1162,7 +1165,7 @@ Point should be at the beginning of the line."
>>>  
>>>  ;;; _
>>>  
>>> -(setq mail-user-agent 'notmuch-user-agent)
>>> +(setq mail-user-agent notmuch-mail-user-agent)
>>
>> OK, I appreciate idea of a smooth upgrade for existing notmuch users. I
>> wonder though if other emacs MUAs do this? I did not see e.g. a
>> gnus-mail-user-agent variable. I'm probably biased because I never use
>> compose-mail to send mail, but I'm wondering if we're better off to just
>> rip the bandage off and let users who want to use notmuch via generic
>> emacs mail sending commands configure that.
>
> I am for 'ripping the bandage off' and not configure mail-user-agent
> outside of notmuch use (and just require 'notmuch would not set anything...)
>
> Could we have some 'compose-mail' variant (different name, of course;
> I had one in mind but then came off-by one problem... >;) which 
> configures mail-user-agent just for that use (or something).
>
> Tomi