Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Allen S. Rout]

Greetings, all.

I'm a 12-year mh-e user converting to Gnus, and I'm trying to decide
between the various posting-style type implementations.  Any religious
baggage or other opinions anyone wants to vent?

The most recent modifications to either of the aliases or
personalities packages seem to be rather old: does that mean that
they're perfect, or irrelevant? :) 


- Allen S. Rout
-- 
- Allen S. Rout

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Bruno Hertz]

"Allen S. Rout" <asr@ufl.edu> writes:

> Greetings, all.
>
> I'm a 12-year mh-e user converting to Gnus, and I'm trying to decide
> between the various posting-style type implementations.  Any religious
> baggage or other opinions anyone wants to vent?
>
> The most recent modifications to either of the aliases or
> personalities packages seem to be rather old: does that mean that
> they're perfect, or irrelevant? :) 

Don't know which 'package' you are talking about, but personalities
are part of Gnus and should work with any (halfway recent) version of
Emacs/Gnus.

Gnus aliases, on the other hand, was afaik independently developed and
never part of Gnus. Apparently, it's not longer maintained, and I
myself discovered it only recently when coming back to Gnus after a
year of evolution or so. I then grabbed the last version of
gnus-alias.el, dating back to 2003, and apart from one or two minor
points it worked alright, with Emacs CVS in my case (IIRC, one issue
was gnus-aliases not properly overriding the reply-to address, but I'm
not sure right now).

So yes, you should be fine with either. Aliases might need one or two
minor fixes, but it'll become apparent as you try it out.

Regards, Bruno.

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Bruno Hertz]

"Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com> writes:

> Don't know which 'package' you are talking about, but personalities
> are part of Gnus and should work with any (halfway recent) version of
> Emacs/Gnus.

Sorry, correction: posting styles are part of Gnus and should work
with any (halfway recent) version of Emacs/Gnus.

Regards, Bruno.

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Allen S. Rout]

"Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com> writes:

> Sorry, correction: posting styles are part of Gnus and should work
> with any (halfway recent) version of Emacs/Gnus.


Right.  I guess what I wonder is, are the personalities / aliases
unmaintained because posting-styles grew to accomplish their
featureset, or because there are now mutually exclusive camps for this
function, each happy with their code.

'part of gnus' is good, and I haven't yet seen something the others do
which can't be accomplished in current posting styles.  The other
packages have a more pleasant way of arranging groups of style
features, but that doesn't really yank my chain.


-- 
- Allen S. Rout

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Marc]

"Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com> writes:

> gnus-alias.el, dating back to 2003, and apart from one or two minor
> points it worked alright, with Emacs CVS in my case (IIRC, one issue

Hi,

Recently I tried to use gnus-alias.el and ran into a problem concerning
the user-mail-address. The documentation says that 
(setq gnus-alias-override-user-mail-address t)
should force the user-mail-addres to match the one in the From field,
but it seems to be broken (at least, in my tests it was not working)
(this is anoying as the Return-Path field will be set according to this
value by the MTA).

'address' field in posting-style is working fine.

Marc

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Bruno Hertz]

"Allen S. Rout" <asr@ufl.edu> writes:

> "Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Sorry, correction: posting styles are part of Gnus and should work
>> with any (halfway recent) version of Emacs/Gnus.
>
>
> Right.  I guess what I wonder is, are the personalities / aliases
> unmaintained because posting-styles grew to accomplish their
> featureset, or because there are now mutually exclusive camps for this
> function, each happy with their code.

I can only guess here, but I think gnus-aliases was done because the
original author thought posting styles was lacking some
features. Example: gnus-aliases provides a menu with the identities
you defined, and while composing a message you can still choose the
identity from that menu. Clearly, this is an advantage to posting
styles, which works fully automatic according to the rules you
defined.

On the other hand, there might be features in posting styles which
can't be accomplished with aliases. I didn't do an actual comparison
but just picked what I thought was most comfortable for me, and that
was aliases in my case. As so often, ymmv, so if you're fine with
posting styles just use them.

Finally, as the author of gnus-aliases writes in his source, it's even
possible to mix aliases and posting styles, although he did not do
that himself, and I didn't either. Still, it's all really your choice.

>
> 'part of gnus' is good, and I haven't yet seen something the others do
> which can't be accomplished in current posting styles.  The other
> packages have a more pleasant way of arranging groups of style
> features, but that doesn't really yank my chain.

As said, if posting styles does all you need, just use them,
especially since they are part of the core Gnus package ...

Regards, Bruno.

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Bruno Hertz]

Marc <dkm@kataplop.net> writes:

> "Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> gnus-alias.el, dating back to 2003, and apart from one or two minor
>> points it worked alright, with Emacs CVS in my case (IIRC, one issue
>
> Hi,
>
> Recently I tried to use gnus-alias.el and ran into a problem concerning
> the user-mail-address. The documentation says that 
> (setq gnus-alias-override-user-mail-address t)
> should force the user-mail-addres to match the one in the From field,
> but it seems to be broken (at least, in my tests it was not working)
> (this is anoying as the Return-Path field will be set according to this
> value by the MTA).
>
> 'address' field in posting-style is working fine.

I think that's part of the minor issues I mentioned. If nobody else
has something to say on this point, just give me some time and I'll
post what I did to fix this (in a maybe quick'n dirty fashion) ...

Regards, Bruno.

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Bruno Hertz]

Marc <dkm@kataplop.net> writes:

> "Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> gnus-alias.el, dating back to 2003, and apart from one or two minor
>> points it worked alright, with Emacs CVS in my case (IIRC, one issue
>
> Hi,
>
> Recently I tried to use gnus-alias.el and ran into a problem concerning
> the user-mail-address. The documentation says that 
> (setq gnus-alias-override-user-mail-address t)
> should force the user-mail-addres to match the one in the From field,
> but it seems to be broken (at least, in my tests it was not working)
> (this is anoying as the Return-Path field will be set according to this
> value by the MTA).
>
> 'address' field in posting-style is working fine.

OK, here's a complete list of things I did to get gnus-alias working
for me:

(1) message-functionp/assoc-ignore-case

If you're using Emacs CVS, change

- all occurences of 'message-functionp' into 'functionp'
- all occurences of '(assoc-ignore-case blah)' into
  '(assoc-string blah t)' or else you'll get compilation
  warnings/errors.

This might not be neccessary for older Emacs versions, so check
first if byte compilation goes OK

(2) message-send-and-exit

This function sets user-mail-address, i.e. effectively reply-to, from
the 'From field. In case that field contains your full name also, like
"Tom Jones" <tom@jones.org> that might cause mail servers to choke. I
changed this to pick just the mail address between '<' and '>', though
in a crude way. This surely breaks easily and can be done better, so
use it just as a starting point if you need it.

(defadvice message-send-and-exit
  (around message-send-and-exit-special-user-mail-address)
  "Temporarily change the value of `user-mail-address' (maybe)."

  (let ((user-mail-address
         (save-restriction
           (message-narrow-to-headers)
           (let* ((from (message-fetch-field "From" t)))
             (if (string-match "<" from)
                 (let* ((first (1+ (string-match "<" from)))
                        (last (string-match ">" from)))
                   (substring from first last))
               from)))))
    ad-do-it)
  )


(3) Enable advice (override-user-mail, forward-as-reply)

'gnus-alias-override-user-mail-address' and 'gnus-alias-allow-forward-as-reply'
functionality is implemented as advice, which isn't enabled nowhere
but the corresponding 'customize' functions. I.e. if you enable those
variables through the 'customize' interface they will work, otherwise
not.

So to get them working anyway, I put the following into my .gnus

(setq gnus-alias-override-user-mail-address t)
(ad-enable-advice 'message-send-and-exit 'around
   'message-send-and-exit-special-user-mail-address)
(ad-activate 'message-send-and-exit)
(setq gnus-alias-allow-forward-as-reply t)
(ad-enable-advice 'message-forward 'around
   'message-forward-with-reply-buffer)
(ad-activate 'message-forward)


And that's it. All of the above is obviously just quick hacking, but
it got me a working gnus-alias setup.

Regards, Bruno.

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Marc Poulhiès]

"Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com> writes:

Hi!

> OK, here's a complete list of things I did to get gnus-alias working
> for me:

[...]

> And that's it. All of the above is obviously just quick hacking, but
> it got me a working gnus-alias setup.
>
> Regards, Bruno.

Thanks very much for this maybe-quick-and-dirty-hack ! It works fine
now!

Marc

Re: Personality / Alias / Posting Style State of the Union?

[Bruno Hertz]

Marc Poulhiès <marc.poulhies@epfl.ch> writes:

> "Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com> writes:
>
> Hi!
>
>> OK, here's a complete list of things I did to get gnus-alias working
>> for me:
>
> [...]
>
>> And that's it. All of the above is obviously just quick hacking, but
>> it got me a working gnus-alias setup.
>>
>> Regards, Bruno.
>
> Thanks very much for this maybe-quick-and-dirty-hack ! It works fine
> now!

Glad it worked. Hopefully, somebody picks that module up, does the
couple of fixes the proper way and incorporates it into Gnus. It's
pretty useful, and I myself like it much ....

Regards, Bruno.