Re: "> > >" space removal removes too many spaces?

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:

> Well, what I wanted to say is the following.  Looking just at one line
> is certainly not enough.  Consider at the following example:
> 
>> According to our analysis, we have a total of
>>>50 cases in which our software fails.  This
>> is, of course, not acceptable.
> 
> '>' may appear at the beginning of a line accidently, and we certainly
> want to supply the space character in this case.

First, wouldn't it be very complicated to solve your case?  It's much
easier to assume that ">" in the first position indicate a quoted
line.  I don't see how you programatically can easily separate your
case from e.g.

> According to your analysis
>>42 is a nice number
> you indicate that 42 is a nice number.

but suggestions are welcome. :)

Secondly, RFC 2646 compliant MUAs should never generate this case in
the first place.  Even if you don't generate RFC 2646 (Gnus doesn't)
you could QP encode the character to prevent the ambiguity.  In Gnus
you could put text properties on quote ">" characters to separate them
from any ">" characters the user enters (of course a user should be
able to insert quote ">" characters as well) and when sending the
mail, QP encode the quote ">" characters.  But this becomes quite
complicated for little gain, I think.