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

["Bruno Hertz" <spammer.go.home@gmail.com>]

"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.