Re: Two gnus-posting-styles problems

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@xemacs.org> writes:

> But I won't test it for some time simply because I really need the
> functionality to test the message buffer.  If that can't be done with
> the posting styles, then I'll just use a hook.  Perhaps I'm simply not
> the right target audience for posting styles.

Perhaps this is reason enough to change it, like Kai said.  Patches,
anyone? :-)

>>>> There's a dependency problem here, not all functions that use
>>>> information from the message buffer and modify the contents of the
>>>> message buffer can be called last.  I think the ordering has changed
>>>> several times, but it won't ever satisfy everyone.  I think the
>>>> approach should be that you shouldn't count on information being
>>>> available in the message buffers unless... err, it is available.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure I understand this.  Why can't it satisfy everyone?  What
>>> is the position opposite to mine?
>>
>> There are alot of hooks and functions that people use to populate
>> message buffers: message-mode-hook, message-setup-hook,
>> gnus-message-setup-hook, gnus-posting-styles, making user-mail-address
>> context sensitive, defadvice etc.  If we change the ordering the way
>> you want, the posting style is applied last, which makes it possible
>> to extract To/From etc from the newly composed message.  But the same
>> change will affect code added to, say, message-setup-hook, since it no
>> longer can extract the fields added by the posting styles code.
>
> I suppose the posting styles could be applied before the
> message-setup-hook is run.

That won't work if people has code in message-setup-hook that assumes
posting styles hasn't been applied yet, will it?  That was the kind of
trouble I feared would happen if we change the ordering.

> But Kai has a good point: doing what I want might seriously clash with
> `message-generate-headers-first'.

Ouch, yes.

> I do not see a way to resolve that, so I'll just keep my hook.  At
> least the `m'/`a' thing, which was a genuine bug, should now be
> fixed, so something good came out of my report.
>
> Thanks for the fix.

I'll commit it, thanks.

>> That said, perhaps changing it to apply posting styles last is good,
>> but it seems difficult to tell what harm to people's customizations
>> it will generate.  Leaving it as is doesn't hurt anything,
>
> Well.  There *could* be a variable that controls when
> `gnus-posting-styles' are applied.  It could default to applying it in
> the empty message buffer, which would make sure that existing
> customizations keep working.

Yup.