Re: [PATCH RFC3.5 06/12] send-email: Cleanup and streamline the SMTP code in send_message

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 20:42, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Michael Witten [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

+                             die "Server does not support STARTTLS: " . $smtp->message . "\n"
+                                     unless $smtp->code == 220;

...
But the following, which is equivalent to what you did, is inexcuable.

       do this;
       do that;
       do something unusual
               if some condition that rarely holds true;
       do some other thing;

When your eyes and brain are coasting over this segment of code, your
thought process needs to stumble and hiccup at the statment that does
something unusual, and then need to realize that it is qualified with a
statement modifier that says "this is only for rare case".

I mostly agree, and I frequently consider[ed] exactly those points.
However, there are 2 things that played a role in my decision:

    * For most conditional cases, I personally
      loathe curly braces around one statement.

    * The flow is actually:

            do this;
            do that;

            DIE "whisper some curses with the last breath"
                UNLESS some condition that holds mostly true;

            do some other thing;

      The "die" and thoughtful spacing should be pretty good clues.
      However, the "unless" can be strange to think with (at first);
      I figured Perlers would be happy with it.

In any case, I also like:

    condition and/or (do something);

or:

    condition and/or do something;

The only thing keeping me from using that more often is that I assume
other people would be less comfortable with it and that it may
introduce an unnecessary comparison of the return value of "do
something"; also, it might make the line a little long, which some
people get really angry about.

Written without statement modifier:

       do this;
       do that;
       if (some consition that rarely holds true) {
               do something unusual
       }
       do some other thing;

I just have a hard time stomaching those curly braces. I really wish
perl didn't enforce them when there's only one statement. Also, I
would use some whitespace:

    do this;
    do that;

    if (some consition that rarely holds true) {
        do something unusual
    }

    do some other thing;

quoted

+             $smtp->mail($raw_from)               and
+             $smtp->to(@recipients)               and
+             $smtp->data                          and
+             $smtp->datasend("$header\n$message") and
+             $smtp->dataend                       or
+
+             die "Failed to send '$subject': " . $smtp->message . "\n";

These do make things more pleasant to read.

Thanks!

P.S.

Sorry if the formatting of this email is bad; I'm in the middle of a
large move between systems, and currently I'm stuck with gmail's
webmail, which insists on reformatting my text and refusing to render
in fixed-width font (though I bet I could hack firefox's css to get
that one working.... hmmm.....), and firefox doesn't make it easy to
input tabs.

So, I've actually been writing and sending some emails with a combination of:

    * vim
    * date +'%a, %e %b %Y %T %z'
    * uuidgen (though I've found gmail makes a Message-ID for me)
    * cat path/to/email.txt | perl -pe 's/\n/\r\n/; END {print
"\r\n"}' | msmtp -t

This email was written in the webmail in firefox; I actually counted
spaces for indentation in the hope that things line up. ;-)