Re: Two gnus-posting-styles problems

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@xemacs.org>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

>> I have yet to try your patch.  Can you explain what it is supposed
>> to do?  I'm not sure I understand the intention from reading the
>> patch.
>
> I see now that the patch accidently included an unrelated patch.
> The point of the patch was simply to bind gnus-article-copy to nil
> in all places where you aren't following up or replying to an
> article -- e.g., when pressing `a' or `m'.  If the variable is nil,
> the posting styles code won't use the last viewed buffer.

I see.  That should work, yes.

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.

>>> 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.

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

> 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.