Hi Marck D. Pearlstone,
On Dienstag, 26. Oktober 1999 at 23:37:08 you wrote:
MDP> On 26 October 1999 at 18:43, [EMAIL PROTECTED] told the list:
OS>> Sorry, I'd have no problem doing that. One possibility is what you
OS>> just mentioned above. If the editor inserted, say, a CR/LF pair
OS>> when the user presses Return, it could easily use a single CR to
OS>> mark those lines that were formatted automatically.
MDP> This only works if the single CRs are converted back to CR/LF pairs
MDP> before transmission. It doesn't help distinguish paragraphs that are
MDP> in quoted text. It doesn't really change very much at all.
So, why shouldn't I convert the single CRs back to CR/LF pairs when
sending the mail? Anyway, any mailer has to be able to handle types of
CR marks, as every unix mail system in the world will only send CR
anyway.
OS>> Also, they should be using a multi-byte charset, there's enough
OS>> space in there to use some magic sequence as a mark.
MDP> There maybe but it means TB users will be able to send mail to other
MDP> TB! users ... again, unless the mail is stripped of special encoding
MDP> before transmission.
Exactly.
OS>> IMHO, the a-f function is just that, a function for display time
OS>> wrapping of continuous strings.
MDP> I think not. IMHO It is a function to move the location of the CR/LF
MDP> pair within the paragraph of message text in memory so that when lines
MDP> are shown on-screen and (more importantly) *when sent* at the position
MDP> you see. The display function doesn't wrap - it shows the already
MDP> wrapped text.
I don't care at all, really. Even if I repeat myself: I want a
function to auto-format the text I type. Without doing anything
harmful to the text I didn't write (like in quotations) or the text in
any other paragraphs apart from the one I'm typing right now. How the
programmer does that... I couldn't care less. But, being a programmer
myself, I can tell it's way from difficult.
OS>> Anyway, this discussion arose when someone said he's not happy
OS>> with the way the function works.
MDP> It arose when I saw a clear definition of a specific fault within a-f
MDP> (as opposed to a "not happy" feeling) which I reported as a bug. I
MDP> also provided a suggested fix from a software engineering perspective.
MDP> I copied the bug report to this list for discussion and this is the
MDP> discussion that has arisen.
I posted a bug report about that myself, also copied to the list. To
me, the bug is simply that the text in my message, be it quoted or
not, has it's format destroyed more often than not. The a-f function
also works in places it has no business doing so, like when I paste
text. Sure, I can temporarily switch it off when typing some text that
should not get formatted, but a single correction in an otherwise
left-bound paragraph will give me a lot of work to do. I can use undo,
but that's no pleasure, either, because the different steps the editor
takes to format the text are undone separately. There's no way, as you
can see in the current paragraph, to start a new line. If I was the
programmer, I'd have to deal with people saying "nice feature, but
very badly thought out".
OS>> Well, as someone also pointed out, it's a first try at a new
OS>> function. Maybe it will become better.
MDP> ... but not without reports of specific faults.
Well, what else can I do?
MDP> I have noticed that whenever I have reported a specific bug to a
MDP> software manufacturer, it has been fixed in about 99% of cases.
MDP> Whenever I have suggested an enhancement to functionality or an
MDP> improvement in a feature I have been pretty regularly ignored ...
MDP> although not always completely ;-).
Making a function work in the way it should have from the start has
nothing to do with enhancing anything. A bug is not only a single
point you can lay your hand on and say "this is what has to be done to
fix it", but it's also failure in concept or implementation. IMO,
that's exactly the point about a-f.
Anyway, about reporting bugs... I have done so several times with The
Bat!, but I'm not too happy with the reaction.
1) There has never been any answer from anyone who would have been
recognizable as a developer. There's no public list of known bugs.
I have no way at all to know if my bug report reached anyone at
all.
2) Many bugs I reported have never been fixed by now, AFAIK. I've not
been on this list for years, but it's half a year since I reported
some things that are still not fixed, although they are not _that_
hard:
- Ctrl-Backspace still doesn't work across newlines.
- Ctrl-A to select all doesn't work when viewing threads. It only
selects the thread top nodes, not _all_. Maybe someone will tell
me it's a feature, but I still have no idea what to use that for.
- Viewing threads is still not good. I've never before used a
mailer that had four different methods to create threads, but
I've used several that combined those methods to provide
consistent threads.
Pardon me for ranting.
Oliver Sturm
--
Oliver Sturm / <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Key ID: 71D86996
Fingerprint: 8085 5C52 60B8 EFBD DAD0 78B8 CE7F 38D7 71D8 6996
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