Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:57:50 -0500
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Adam Wolfe Gordon <awg+notmuch@xvx.ca>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5.2 7/7] emacs: Use the new JSON reply format and
	message-cite-original
Message-ID: <20120222165750.GC30513@mit.edu>
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Quoth Adam Wolfe Gordon on Feb 21 at  9:49 am:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 22:59, Austin Clements <amdragon@mit.edu> wrote:
> > I've been thinking about this more.  message-mode's default citation
> > line is really unfortunate and quite possibly insane ("writes" isn't
> > even the right tense and what's up with that extra line break?).  The
> > option to change this is also well hidden (as an experiment, I tried
> > navigating to it through customize and couldn't figure out where it
> > was, even though I knew what I was looking for).  In general, I'm a
> > fan of inheriting as many options from Emacs as possible, but people
> > *are* going to ask how to change this and the default setting *is*
> > going to turn people off of notmuch ("What mail client do you use that
> > generates those quirky citation lines?"  "I use notmuch!"  "Is that,
> > like, from the 80's?").
> 
> Agreed. It's a really unfortunate default.
> 
> > So, what about adding a notmuch customize option for selecting the
> > citation line format?  It could offer a few const choices, including a
> > default, sane format, plus the option to enter your own or to fall
> > back to whatever message-mode is configured to do.  If we do this,
> > it's probably best done in a follow-up series, but this seemed like an
> > appropriate place to bring it up.
> 
> I think there are two options, which have been discussed a bit before [1]:

Ah, interesting.  I hadn't been following this series at that point.

> 1) Wrap the citation format with a notmuch customization variable,
> notmuch-citation-line-format or somesuch. Then set the
> message-citation-line-format before calling message-cite-original.
> 
> 2) Have notmuch load a user config file (~/.notmuch.el or something)
> on startup, and provide a default file that sets nice defaults for
> things like message-citation-line-format. The default file could even
> be constructed on first run, such that if the user has already
> customized some things (like message-citation-line-format) we can keep
> their settings.
> 
> Option 2 is obviously more work, but I think it's the right way to go,
> at least in the long run. In addition to giving a place to provide
> nice defaults for non-notmuch variables, it gives the user a nice
> place to specify notmuch-specific config. For example, I use
> completely separate init files for notmuch and other emacs usage, and
> having a notmuch config file would let me get away from this slightly
> kludgey setup.

That is an intriguing idea.  My main concern would be
forwards-compatibility.  When we find some other variable that we want
to add to this file, what do we do with already-generated
.notmuch.els?

I wouldn't dismiss option 1, though.  From a user's perspective, it is
visible that they're using message-mode to edit message drafts and
hence natural that they would customize message-mode to control
editing behavior, but they create a reply by pressing 'r' in a
*notmuch* buffer, which naturally associates the operation with
notmuch, not message-mode.  I would go so far as to say reply's use of
message-mode is an implementation detail.  Hence, I would never expect
an uninformed user to guess that they have to go to message-mode to
customize the citation format.

> In either case, this can probably come as a separate patch series, but
> it is good to start discussing it here.
> 
> [1] id:"m2mx9i3onw.fsf@wal122.wireless-pennnet.upenn.edu"