On Sat, 07 Feb 2026 at 17:23:11 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
3. (A bigger change.) Start adopting XKCD 1285 formatting for Policy in
new text: each sentence on its own logical line (thus often longer than
80 columns), with a newline at the end of each sentence.
A weaker version of this would be to continue to break lines at 80ish
columns, but start a new line for new sentences, and make some sort of
effort to break in a logical position (after commas/semicolons/etc.) if
the line break would have been reasonably close to that position anyway.
That has a similar effect of limiting spurious diffstat for changes
within a sentence, but without making long sentences always imply long lines.
I've reformatted part of your message in this style below, being a bit
more enthusiastic about breaking after commas than I normally would be
to illustrate what it can look like:
Because the input is reStructuredText, I don't believe the whitespace
after periods makes a difference in the output.
The only place I'm unsure is with the PDF and texinfo output,
since the spacing is preserved in the input to TeX,
but some spot checking seems to indicate that TeX makes its own decisions
and ignores the spacing.
At work, we use 3, and in general I prefer it, but it's a big change and
would mean lines in email messages for review would break the normal email
formatting conventions.
It's quite nice in software forges and avoids the problems with reflowing
paragraphs causing spurious meaningless deltas in Git,
but as long as we're using email review, it might be a bridge too far?
"Nice for software forges" here should be read as "nice for software
forges, and anything else that uses a relatively simple line-oriented
diff tool". Not everyone with an interest in the history of Policy uses
a highly-extensible text editor that is trying its best to achieve
sentience :-)
smcv
