Newline disappears (not sure if Gnus or Emacs fault)

Newline disappears (not sure if Gnus or Emacs fault)

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

Hi,

I've been noticing this behavior for a long time, but yesterday it has
really annoyed me because it made me waste a lot of time trying to
understand why a patch wasn't applying.

The problem: Gnus (or Emacs) is eating some newline characters in
messages.  This happens particularly often with hyperlinks, but
yesterday it happened inside an inlined patch in a message.

So take for example:

---
# This line is a comment followed by an empty line.

-all: bla.c
+all: bla.c blergh.c
---

This would be a normal piece of a patch.  However, I received this:

---
# This line is a comment followed by an empty line.
 -all: bla.c
+all: bla.c blergh.c
---

I.e., the empty line got swalled and became a space character.  I did a
search for "gnus bug newline" or similar terms, but couldn't find
anything useful.

Do you guys happen to know what could be happening?  Maybe it's Emacs
fault?

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Sergio

Re: Newline disappears (not sure if Gnus or Emacs fault)

[Tassilo Horn]

Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@riseup.net> writes:

Hi Sergio,

> The problem: Gnus (or Emacs) is eating some newline characters in
> messages.  This happens particularly often with hyperlinks, but
> yesterday it happened inside an inlined patch in a message.

I'd rather say it's the fault of the email client of the mail's sender
which probably uses "format=flowed".  Have a look at 

,----[ git-format-patch(1) ]
| 	By default, Thunderbird will both wrap emails as well as
| 	flag them as being format=flowed, both of which will make
| 	the resulting email unusable by git.
`----

The same applies not just to Thunderbird, but probably to most graphical
mail clients in use today.  So either the sender should disable that
somehow, or attach patches as attachment instead of inline.

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: Newline disappears (not sure if Gnus or Emacs fault)

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

On Wednesday, March 06 2013, Tassilo Horn wrote:

> Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@riseup.net> writes:
>
> Hi Sergio,

Hi Tassilo,

>> The problem: Gnus (or Emacs) is eating some newline characters in
>> messages.  This happens particularly often with hyperlinks, but
>> yesterday it happened inside an inlined patch in a message.
>
> I'd rather say it's the fault of the email client of the mail's sender
> which probably uses "format=flowed".  Have a look at 
>
> ,----[ git-format-patch(1) ]
> | 	By default, Thunderbird will both wrap emails as well as
> | 	flag them as being format=flowed, both of which will make
> | 	the resulting email unusable by git.
> `----
>
> The same applies not just to Thunderbird, but probably to most graphical
> mail clients in use today.  So either the sender should disable that
> somehow, or attach patches as attachment instead of inline.

You are right.  The guy is using mutt, but he enabled the format=flowed
in the message.  That, and also the fact that he hand-edited the patch,
made it impossible to apply cleanly.

Thanks a lot,

-- 
Sergio