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

On Wed, May 12 2021, Dave Huseby wrote:

On 12.05.2021 10:45, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

quoted

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.