Cindy Sue Causey (12024-05-15): > Best as I was able to discern from the Net [0], 72 characters is the > magic number for line length because 4 extra characters are added to > both ends when e.g. git processes submissions. Makes good common sense > to me.
Git is an order of magnitude younger than the limit at 72 characters. > PS I thought it was 80. Guess it was about those extra 8 characters. It is 80 but you anticipate that people will be adding “> ” in front of your lines. > "Pretty well agreed upon..." That's implying that unspoken list > standards are really not users "picking on each other." Listserv > standards is a concept that has evolved over decades for rational > reasons as Developer and User communications evolved. Indeed. > It's easy to mess up badly while moving emails around As a general rule, GUIs suck at anything but trivial tasks. > Evolution appears to do some form of maybe symlinking instead of > downloading so everything is available almost immediately seconds after > the first time Evolution is ever fired up. The IMAP protocol is designed to let us manipulate mails directly on the server without downloading the bulk of them. A lot of GUI MUA are still designed around the old paradigm where mails are downloaded, and turned it into some kind of cache: it rarely works well. Manipulate mails directly on the server. Have a backup. If your server is often down and accessing the mails is urgent, have a local *copy* of it. > reach back a limited time span into history before I a-sume Gmail cut > off access to touching older emails. If you want mail that works well, start by avoiding services meant for the lowest common denominator of the general public. Regards, -- Nicolas George