Re: [PATCH/RFC] doc: about email clients for Linux kernel patches

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 08:02:29AM -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote:
> Adrian Bunk wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 01:24:13PM +0800, WANG Cong wrote:
>>> On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 08:29:26PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 10:16:44AM -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote:
>>>>> ...
>>>>> +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>>>> +Mutt (TUI)
>>>>> +
>>>>> +Plenty of Linux developers use mutt, so it must work pretty well.
>>>>> +
>>>>> +Are there any special config options that are needed??
>>>>> ...
>>>> It should work with default settings.
>>>
>>> I can't agree with this.
>>>
>>> It took me lots of time to configure mutt to work well for me in the 
>>> first
>>> time. Just default settings are far _not_ enough, especially for us
>>> non-english-speakers. One common setting is the encoding, of course, lkml
>>> prefers UTF-8, so I must set my mutt with `set 
>>> send_charset="us-ascii:utf-8"`.
>> This makes sense, but it's not really a mutt specific issue and problems 
>> because mutt prefers iso-8859-1 over UTF-8 by default are
>> quite rare.
>>> Manuals of mutt told me to add "subscribe linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" 
>>> if I
>>> subscribed lkml, but in fact, we'd better _not_ add this, or it will drop
>>> myself from cc list.
>>>
>>> Or other things like these.
>>> ...
>> Whether or not people want to get personal copies of answers to mailing
>> list posts is a religious issue being second only to the vi<->emacs 
>> wars...
>> But as far as I understand it, this documentation is intended to help 
>> people to get sending patches right (no line wrap etc.), not as a generic 
>> documentation for mail clients.
>
> Definitely.
> and to reduce the amount of repetition that we have to do.
>
> I'll add a bit about it not being complete s/w package config info.

One point from this email that might be appropriate for the
"General Preferences" section of your document would be to suggest 
configuring the MUA to send text encoded as UTF-8, something like:

The kernel source code is encoded in UTF-8, and if you configure your 
email client to send emails UTF-8 encoded you avoid some possible 
charset problems.

> thanks,
> ~Randy

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

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