Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-03-31 Thread Arve Barsnes
On 31 March 2018 at 10:18, Martin Vaeth  wrote:
> Exceptions are only certain well-defined APIs which will presumably
> not change dramatically in future versions.
> For instance, there is a tab API, but essentially it is limited
> to basic things like searching/activating/closing/opening tabs etc:
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Working_with_the_Tabs_API
> So no WebExtension will ever be able to offer tab functionality which
> goes beyond that.

Take a look at their bugzilla for bugs tracking a lot of new
functionality in the extension APIs that will come in future releases.
Especially around tabs, as many popular extensions did stuff with
tabs.

Personally I upgraded despite losing some stuff, but I think most of
it will return in some form at some point.



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-03-31 Thread tuxic
On 03/31 12:17, Arve Barsnes wrote:
> On 31 March 2018 at 10:18, Martin Vaeth  wrote:
> > Exceptions are only certain well-defined APIs which will presumably
> > not change dramatically in future versions.
> > For instance, there is a tab API, but essentially it is limited
> > to basic things like searching/activating/closing/opening tabs etc:
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Working_with_the_Tabs_API
> > So no WebExtension will ever be able to offer tab functionality which
> > goes beyond that.
> 
> Take a look at their bugzilla for bugs tracking a lot of new
> functionality in the extension APIs that will come in future releases.
> Especially around tabs, as many popular extensions did stuff with
> tabs.
> 
> Personally I upgraded despite losing some stuff, but I think most of
> it will return in some form at some point.
> 

Firefox is eaten my RAM (8GB) . An application, which does not co-operate
with other applications due to its memory footprint does not co-operate
with other application due to its memory footprint regardless how
advance it is.

There two reasons for which I have switched to waterfox: Privacy and
memory.

About:config and search for "telemetry"

Or check how many URLS are configured under about:config.
Why need the browser need to know them in beforehand?

Cheers
Meino



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-01 Thread Dale
Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-04-01 16:29, Martin Vaeth wrote:
>
>> An alarm sign for me was that palemoon was eventually dropped for
>> android after being practically unmaintained (i.e. with known open
>> security holes) for months/years. A similar alarm sign concerning
>> linux is that they were not able to pull the fixes for the assembler
>> code which relied on undocumented behaviour of <=gcc-5, even months
>> after gcc-7 was out. Even if these problems are not marked as
>> "security" issues, they can easily be some.
> WTH is even assembly code _doing_ in a browser??  That is insane.
>
> now that I know this is the reason why palemoon needs gcc 4, I will
> definitely look into it more closely.
>
>


Just for giggles, I tried to re-emerge palemoon.  This is part of the
output I got.


>>> Running pre-merge checks for www-client/palemoon-27.8.3
 * Checking for at least 7 GiB disk space at
"/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/temp"
... 
 
[ ok ]
 * Checking compiler profile...
 * Building Pale Moon with a compiler other than a supported gcc version
 * may result in an unstable build.
 * You can use gcc-config to change your compiler profile, just remember
 * to change it back afterwards.
 * You need to have the appropriate versions of gcc installed for them
 * to be shown in gcc-config.
 * Alternatively, you can set the PALEMOON_ENABLE_UNSUPPORTED_COMPILERS
 * environment variable to 1 either by exporting it from the current shell
 * or by adding it to your make.conf file.
 * Be aware though that building Pale Moon with an unsupported compiler
 * means that the official support channels may refuse to offer any
 * kind of help in case the build fails or the browser behaves incorrectly.
 * Supported GCC versions: 4.7, 4.9
 * Selected GCC version: 6.4
 * ERROR: www-client/palemoon-27.8.3::palemoon failed (pretend phase):
 *   (no error message)
 *
 * Call stack:
 *   ebuild.sh, line 124:  Called pkg_pretend
 *   ebuild.sh, line 357:  Called palemoon-4_pkg_pretend
 *   palemoon-4.eclass, line  22:  Called die
 * The specific snippet of code:
 *  die
 *
 * If you need support, post the output of `emerge --info
'=www-client/palemoon-27.8.3::palemoon'`,
 * the complete build log and the output of `emerge -pqv
'=www-client/palemoon-27.8.3::palemoon'`.
 * The complete build log is located at
'/var/log/portage/www-client:palemoon-27.8.3:20180401-230351.log'.
 * For convenience, a symlink to the build log is located at
'/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/temp/build.log'.
 * The ebuild environment file is located at
'/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/temp/die.env'.
 * Working directory: '/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/homedir'
 * S: '/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/work/palemoon-27.8.3'



That is from the overlay palemoon and the latest version of it.  So, it
still depends on a old version of gcc which considering the age of it,
is sort of odd.  Why has that not been updated?  Is it updatable or is
it going to require some serious time consuming effort to do so and
there are not enough people to do it?  The overlay I might add, has the
latest version of Palemoon according to the website.  It's not the
overlay that is running behind, it's palemoon itself. 

I admit, I wish things didn't have to update so often at times BUT for
some things, it just has to be that way.  I don't worry about security
issues with something like Kwrite or Okular but I do worry about it with
things like web browsers that I use to make purchases or check on
financial websites such as banks etc.  I want those to be secure as
possible even if it means updating each week. 

This is interesting.  Others who use palemoon may at least want to be
aware of it. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-01 Thread Michael King
I've been using Palemoon, built with gcc/6.40-r1, for about a month now with 
only two crashes that I can think of. Otherwise it has been doing everything I 
need in a browser and I'm very happy with it. I still keep Firefox around, but 
rarely fire it up anymore.

I am curious, however, what the Palemoon devs will do once support for 
gcc/6.4.0 is dropped, as it straight-up won't let me build Palemoon with 
anything newer. I guess a person could just use the pre-built binaries from the 
"palemoon" overlay, but I've been building it from source from the "octopus" 
overlay.

On 04/01/2018 05:26 PM, Ian Zimmerman wrote:

On 2018-04-01 16:29, Martin Vaeth wrote:



An alarm sign for me was that palemoon was eventually dropped for
android after being practically unmaintained (i.e. with known open
security holes) for months/years. A similar alarm sign concerning
linux is that they were not able to pull the fixes for the assembler
code which relied on undocumented behaviour of <=gcc-5, even months
after gcc-7 was out. Even if these problems are not marked as
"security" issues, they can easily be some.



WTH is even assembly code _doing_ in a browser??  That is insane.

now that I know this is the reason why palemoon needs gcc 4, I will
definitely look into it more closely.



Experience shows that it is not possible to "hide":
Sooner or later a website you do have to use for some reason
will require such a feature. Eventually the number of these
websites increases. And then you are at a dead end.
Nowadays, it has already "practically" become impossible to
use exclusively lynx or (e)links; in a while it will be impossible
to use a browser which does not support certain new "features".



You know the economist Keynes quote about "the long run".  Applies quite
well here.





Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-01 Thread Bill Kenworthy
On 02/04/18 08:28, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-04-01 18:22, Dale wrote:
>
>> Just for giggles, I tried to re-emerge palemoon. This is part of the
>> output I got.
>>
>> * Supported GCC versions: 4.7, 4.9
>> * Selected GCC version: 6.4
> I no longer use the overlay; I have my own private ebuild series.  I
> tried to remove the old gcc dependency, but as Martin says it doesn't
> work; the build just crashes at a later point.
>
> Luckily gcc is slotted so I can keep the old version around just for
> this purpose.
>
I use the palemoon overlay.

builds fine with gcc-6.4 etc:

PALEMOON_ENABLE_UNSUPPORTED_COMPILERS=1 emerge palemoon

and

rattus ~ # equery l palemoon
 * Searching for palemoon ...
[I-O] [  ] www-client/palemoon-27.8.2:0
rattus ~ #



BillK





Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread tuxic
On 04/02 05:41, Martin Vaeth wrote:
> Bill Kenworthy  wrote:
> > I use the palemoon overlay.
> 
> There is also the octopus overlay.
> Anyway, both can only react to upstream.
> 
> > builds fine with gcc-6.4
> 
> Yes, but it has random crashes which do not occur with gcc-5,
> and as somebody familiar with the code posted somewhere,
> the reasons are quite some assumptions in assembler code
> which should not have been made. (I simply repeated these
> claims without checking them.)
> 
> Upstream knows about it and therefore officially does not
> support building with gcc-6. Since firefox upstream has fixed
> all these things ages ago, and palemoon is not able to identify
> or pull the corresponding patches this shows IMHO that it
> has already diverged to a degree that it cannot be reasonably
> maintained with the resources they have, and I doubt that
> security issues are closed (or worse: recognized) timely:
> In contrast to crashes (even Heisenbug crashes), security
> issues cannot be "detected" if there is no expert regularly
> checking the code very carfully.
> 
> The decision to stick with legacy extension api completely
> excludes that there is some convergence of the fork in the
> future.
> 
> Also the refusal to implement webextension apis (which is
> consequent, since it is hardly possible to maintain 2
> more and more diverging apis) has the side effect that
> only obsolete versions of the actively maintained extensions
> like noscript and ublock-origin can be used. In the moment,
> the legacy version of noscript is still maintained, but only
> because of the tor browser. I suppose eventually this will change.
> 
> I also do not know much about waterfox, but if one goal ist
> to keep legacy extensions, I am afraid it will go the palemoon
> way, too:
> It seems currently that mozilla, google, and apple are the only
> oranganizations with enough resources to maintain full browsers,
> and any forks of their browsers which diverge more than a patchset
> of essentially fixed size are doomed to fail for this very reason.
> 
> 


...and if after all that (at least) firefox gets so bulky and has such
a hugh memory footprint that (on a multitasking OS) no other
reasonable "powerful" application will multitask with it (or your
machine goes swapping) and if mozilla itsself walks down an at least
questionable way...then...
What?

In the moment I cannot use firefox - regardless how
advanced/secure/modern/or what it is. It does not fit into
my working environment - it is to huge.

Cheers
Meino





Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread tuxic
On 04/02 08:23, Martin Vaeth wrote:
> tu...@posteo.de  wrote:
> > On 04/02 05:41, Martin Vaeth wrote:
> >> It seems currently that mozilla, google, and apple are the only
> >> oranganizations with enough resources to maintain full browsers,
> >> and any forks of their browsers which diverge more than a patchset
> >> of essentially fixed size are doomed to fail for this very reason.
> >
> > ...and if after all that (at least) firefox gets so bulky and has such
> > a hugh memory footprint that (on a multitasking OS) no other
> > reasonable "powerful" application will multitask with it (or your
> > machine goes swapping) and if mozilla itsself walks down an at least
> > questionable way...then...
> > What?
> 
> It's the way it is whether you like it or not.
> 
> > In the moment I cannot use firefox - regardless how
> > advanced/secure/modern/or what it is. It does not fit into
> > my working environment - it is to huge.
> 
> The memory footprint of the main system with firefox is here
> about 1GB. So if you have another memory hungry application running
> (like emerging gcc in the background) you will need at least 2GB.
> I guess 2GB RAM is about the limit to have a usable system, nowadays.
> Working with 2GB and a dual core is possible with current gentoo
> and firefox without too many restrictions, but of course it is much
> more fun with 8GB and i3, which is probably about the smallest
> desktop machine which you get nowadays (if you buy a new one).
> 
> 

I found an interesting thread here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7zfopp/howto_geek_recommends_against_using_waterfox_pale/

Cheers
Meino






Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread Dale
tu...@posteo.de wrote:
> On 04/02 05:41, Martin Vaeth wrote:
>> Bill Kenworthy  wrote:
>>> I use the palemoon overlay.
>> There is also the octopus overlay.
>> Anyway, both can only react to upstream.
>>
>>> builds fine with gcc-6.4
>> Yes, but it has random crashes which do not occur with gcc-5,
>> and as somebody familiar with the code posted somewhere,
>> the reasons are quite some assumptions in assembler code
>> which should not have been made. (I simply repeated these
>> claims without checking them.)
>>
>> Upstream knows about it and therefore officially does not
>> support building with gcc-6. Since firefox upstream has fixed
>> all these things ages ago, and palemoon is not able to identify
>> or pull the corresponding patches this shows IMHO that it
>> has already diverged to a degree that it cannot be reasonably
>> maintained with the resources they have, and I doubt that
>> security issues are closed (or worse: recognized) timely:
>> In contrast to crashes (even Heisenbug crashes), security
>> issues cannot be "detected" if there is no expert regularly
>> checking the code very carfully.
>>
>> The decision to stick with legacy extension api completely
>> excludes that there is some convergence of the fork in the
>> future.
>>
>> Also the refusal to implement webextension apis (which is
>> consequent, since it is hardly possible to maintain 2
>> more and more diverging apis) has the side effect that
>> only obsolete versions of the actively maintained extensions
>> like noscript and ublock-origin can be used. In the moment,
>> the legacy version of noscript is still maintained, but only
>> because of the tor browser. I suppose eventually this will change.
>>
>> I also do not know much about waterfox, but if one goal ist
>> to keep legacy extensions, I am afraid it will go the palemoon
>> way, too:
>> It seems currently that mozilla, google, and apple are the only
>> oranganizations with enough resources to maintain full browsers,
>> and any forks of their browsers which diverge more than a patchset
>> of essentially fixed size are doomed to fail for this very reason.
>>
>>
>
> ...and if after all that (at least) firefox gets so bulky and has such
> a hugh memory footprint that (on a multitasking OS) no other
> reasonable "powerful" application will multitask with it (or your
> machine goes swapping) and if mozilla itsself walks down an at least
> questionable way...then...
> What?
>
> In the moment I cannot use firefox - regardless how
> advanced/secure/modern/or what it is. It does not fit into
> my working environment - it is to huge.
>
> Cheers
> Meino
>

I have to agree.  I use different Firefox profiles for different
things.  One reason, I can be logged into same website but as different
users at the same time.  Another reason, when one profile becomes a
memory hog, I can restart it but not disturb the others.  Another
reason, I can customize each profile based on what I do with it.  I
notice in the last year or so that Firefox regularly uses over 1GB of
ram in most all of my profiles.  Sometimes it can approach 2GBs.  I've
tried going to about:memory and clicking the free up memory button but
it does little good.  It may free up some but generally not enough to
matter.  Closing and restarting Firefox does work tho.  I have one
profile that I use for things such as financial sites and ordering
online.  I use addons like noscript, adblock and such which sort of
helps prevent tracking and such.  I also use the https addon with it as
well. 

I sort of wish Firefox would shrink back down on its size and let us
install addons for features we want and be able to do that for each
profile.  For example, I have one profile that I use to download videos
with.  It has download helper installed on it but I don't install it on
the other profiles.  On one profile, I have a screenshot tool
installed.  I use it to document some admin/mod stuff I do on a
website.  I don't need a screenshot tool on other profiles tho.
Basically, it would be nice if more things were that way because we can
chose what features we want for each profile based on what we do with
it.  Even USE flags won't work with this because if it is done with USE
flags, it applies to all profiles.  Even if a person only has one
profile, they just install what features they want instead of a whole
bunch of stuff that may never be used or even wanted.

While I like progress on some things, others, I wish progress had more
options.  Sometimes, I don't want a bloated monster of a program.  If
anything, I may want to add things that improve security but has no
other "features" included.  Then on others, I may not care much about
security but want features.  Having a bare program and the ability to
add features, that allows everyone to have what they want.  They can
pick a huge bloated program or a bare metal barely gets the job done
program. 

Just thinking out loud.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-) 



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread Walter Dnes
On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 05:41:03AM +, Martin Vaeth wrote

  I don't speak officially for Pale Moon.  See
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7818 for the official
word about the manpower situation.  Mind you, the Pale Moon team may not
have the staffing level required to write a new compiler, maintain a
politically correct "community", integrate real-time-chat into the
browser, integrate "Pocket" into the browser, rewrite the GUI every so
often, yada, yada, yada.  BTW, Firefox's share of the mobile market is
0.53% as per netmarketshare.com

https://netmarketshare.com/?options={%22filter%22%3A{%22%24and%22%3A[{%22deviceType%22%3A{%22%24in%22%3A[%22Mobile%22]}}]}%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A{%22share%22%3A-1}%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-03%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-02%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%2C%22pageLength%22%3A10}

So why bother?

  As far as features are concerned, again go to the official website
http://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml

> The decision to stick with legacy extension api completely excludes
> that there is some convergence of the fork in the future.

  As an end-user, I think you're missing the whole point of Pale Moon.
If I really wanted a Chrome-like browser, I'd use Chrome in the first
place.  I, and a lot of other people, switched to Pale Moon precisely
because we *DO NOT WANT* what Firefox has become.  To quote an old
meme... I didn't leave Firefox... Firefox left me.

> Also the refusal to implement webextension apis (which is consequent,
> since it is hardly possible to maintain 2 more and more diverging
> apis) has the side effect that only obsolete versions of the actively
> maintained extensions like noscript and ublock-origin can be used.

  Wrong.  Pale Moon has its own XUL extension ecosystem at
https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/   Since they're written
specifically for Pale Moon, the compatability headaches of using Firefox
extensions do not exist.

Noscript equivalents...
* https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/noscript/
* https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/yesscript/

Adblockers...
* https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/abprime/
* https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/adblock-latitude/

-- 
Walter Dnes 
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread Bill Kenworthy
On 02/04/18 13:41, Martin Vaeth wrote:
> Bill Kenworthy  wrote:
>> I use the palemoon overlay.
> There is also the octopus overlay.
> Anyway, both can only react to upstream.
>
>> builds fine with gcc-6.4
> Yes, but it has random crashes which do not occur with gcc-5,
> and as somebody familiar with the code posted somewhere,
> the reasons are quite some assumptions in assembler code
> which should not have been made. (I simply repeated these
> claims without checking them.)
>
> Upstream knows about it and therefore officially does not

Pretty stable for me - ymmv.  What is annoying is sometimes complex
pages do not load properly (e.g., job application sites which seem to
have a lot of JavaScript running in the background.- possibly due to add
blocking while FF when it works is vanilla)


BillK






Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread Daniel Frey
On 04/02/18 08:21, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-04-02 03:59, Dale wrote:
> 
>> That last bit should read can NOT win. Brain didn't quite make it all
>> the way to keyboard. lol
> 
> I read it as beautifully subtle sarcasm, so it worked fine as it was.
> 
> BTW, your mails are full of strange space characters - I didn't
> investigate if they're some Unicode spaces or the Windows codepage
> variety.  Can you turn that off? 
> 
> ;-)
> 

I don't see any extra spaces in Dale's message, you should also probably
check your local configuration.

Dan



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread Philip Webb
180402 Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-04-02 08:26, Daniel Frey wrote:
>> I don't see any extra spaces in Dale's message, you should also
>> probably check your local configuration.
> They render fine for me in mutt/neomutt, too.

Same here.

> I can only see the strange spaces in my editor (emacs 24)
> when I start replying to him and quote his material.

No problem with Vim.

-- 
,,
SUPPORT ___//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT`-O--O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca




Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread Dale
Martin Vaeth wrote:
> Daniel Frey  wrote:
>> On 04/02/18 08:21, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>>> BTW, your mails are full of strange space characters
>> I don't see any extra spaces in Dale's message
> After every "." there is a non-breakable space inserted.
> I guess this is an attempt of some editor to non-french-space
> ASCII texts.
>
>
>

I wonder, after each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two
spaces, not one.  Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still
do.  I only put one after a comma tho.  Could that be triggering something?

I'm using Seamonkey which is set to send plain text to anything Gentoo
related.  Other than that, it's set the way it is.  I'm not sure if I
can change anything else on it. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread Philip Webb
180402 Dale wrote:
> After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
> Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> I only put one after a comma tho.

That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.

> Could that be triggering something ?
> I'm using Seamonkey set to send plain text to anything Gentoo related.

IIRC HTML defaults to collapse double spaces to single ;
word-processors do so too, if you don't tell them not to.

-- 
,,
SUPPORT ___//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT`-O--O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca




Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-02 Thread Dale
Philip Webb wrote:
> 180402 Dale wrote:
>> After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
>> Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
>> I only put one after a comma tho.
> That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.
>
>> Could that be triggering something ?
>> I'm using Seamonkey set to send plain text to anything Gentoo related.
> IIRC HTML defaults to collapse double spaces to single ;
> word-processors do so too, if you don't tell them not to.
>


When I get my copy back, it still contains two spaces after each
sentence.  It seems Seamonkey at least is working as it should in that
regard. 

I'm not sure what others are seeing or should be seeing tho, other than
what I sent of course.  ;-) 

Dale

:-)  :-) 



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-03 Thread Peter Humphrey
On Monday, 2 April 2018 21:50:30 BST Philip Webb wrote:
> 180402 Dale wrote:
> > After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
> > Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> > I only put one after a comma tho.
> 
> That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.

Correct? In what sense? I've only encountered the practice in American writers 
(and now Canadian?), so it seems to be a regional preference.

> > Could that be triggering something ?
> > I'm using Seamonkey set to send plain text to anything Gentoo related.
> 
> IIRC HTML defaults to collapse double spaces to single ;
> word-processors do so too, if you don't tell them not to.

KMail also has an option to collapse double spaces to one.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.






Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-03 Thread Neil Bothwick
On Tue, 03 Apr 2018 09:28:40 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:

> > > After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces,
> > > not one. Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> > > I only put one after a comma tho.  
> > 
> > That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow
> > too.  
> 
> Correct? In what sense? I've only encountered the practice in American
> writers (and now Canadian?), so it seems to be a regional preference.

It was done in the UK too. It dates back to the days of typewriters with
monospaced text, to make sentence breaks clearer. It's an anachronism
nowadays, but a habit that is hard to break if you were brought up that
way.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

PC DOS Error #04: Out of disk space. Delete Windows? (Y)es (H)ell yes!


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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-03 Thread Marc Joliet
Am Dienstag, 3. April 2018, 11:02:32 CEST schrieb Neil Bothwick:
> On Tue, 03 Apr 2018 09:28:40 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > > > After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces,
> > > > not one. Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> > > > I only put one after a comma tho.
> > > 
> > > That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow
> > > too.
> > 
> > Correct? In what sense? I've only encountered the practice in American
> > writers (and now Canadian?), so it seems to be a regional preference.
> 
> It was done in the UK too. It dates back to the days of typewriters with
> monospaced text, to make sentence breaks clearer. It's an anachronism
> nowadays, but a habit that is hard to break if you were brought up that
> way.

There's also support for it in text editors, e.g., Vim has an option (append 
'J' to cpoptions) that makes it treat only punctuation followed by two spaces 
as a sentence delimiter, so that using '(' and ')' to move between sentences 
skips abbreviations, which I find very practical (and which is basically why I 
started following this convention in the first place).  Emacs behaves this way 
by default, but you can override it by setting 'sentence-end-double-space' to 
nil, according to the Emacs manual.

HTH
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup






Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-03 Thread Walter Dnes
On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 08:21:17AM -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote
> On 2018-04-02 03:59, Dale wrote:
> 
> > That last bit should read can NOT win. Brain didn't quite make it all
> > the way to keyboard. lol
> 
> I read it as beautifully subtle sarcasm, so it worked fine as it was.
> 
> BTW, your mails are full of strange space characters - I didn't
> investigate if they're some Unicode spaces or the Windows codepage
> variety.  Can you turn that off? 

  I checked with mc (Midnight Commander) using hex mode view.  In that
message from Dale, occurences of "{SPACE}{SPACE}" are encoded as hex
"A0 20".  I.e. the first of 2 spaces has the high bit set.

-- 
Walter Dnes 
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

2018-04-04 Thread Wol's lists

On 02/04/18 21:50, Philip Webb wrote:

180402 Dale wrote:

After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
I only put one after a comma tho.

That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.

I was taught to always start every paragraph with an indent. Which I 
believe is against "professional secretarial style".


Different horses, different courses. I believe the indent was dropped to 
save a keystroke, so why the double-space is there (requiring an extra 
keystroke) I don't know.


And why use secretarial style when you're typesetting? One is for 
letters, the other is typically for books ... that's the trouble with 
all this Artificial Stupidity - it blindly enforces rules that are 
irrelevant (or even wrong!!!) for the current scenario.


Cheers,
Wol