From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel
Subject: Re: [git pull][resend] Input updates for 2.6.22-rc7
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:09:49 UTC
Message-ID: <fa.dJLARsFLFkz9Isp0gVJ6B6Vlk8I@ifi.uio.no>

[ Ok, pulled. However, it's time for another installment of "Flame that
  stupid mail client", because this isn't the first time this bit me ]

On Thu, 5 Jul 2007, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
>
> Please consider pulling from:
>
>         git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dtor/input.git for-linus

There's something wrong with your emails, and it's very irritating.

I cannot just cut-and-paste the whole line, because your tabs and spaces
aren't tabs and spaces, they are some horrible abomination.

What _looks_ like a tab above, when I save it and look at it with "od", it
shows it true nasty life: it's not a tab, and it's not even eight spaces,
it's four copies of the byte sequence '\302\240 ' ('\xC2\xA0\x20'), ie
some horrid nasty three-byte sequence where one character is a space, and
the previous two characters are some utf-8 abomination.

I have no idea what kind of crap you use to generate it, and quite
frankly, I don't want to know. I just want it to stop, so that when I
cut-and-paste, I don't get random UTF-8 characters that just *look* like
spaces but don't act like it, and cause my shell to very reasonably whine
about the result.

I think the "c2 a0" character is the utf-8 representation of a &nbsp
(non-breaking space), but:
 - you are damn well sending text
 - it's followed by a regular space, so it's stupid
 - please don't do it.

It says your user-agent is "Kmail", and maybe there is some way to fix it.
And if kmail is correct, please make a bug-report to the kmail people.
Sending hidden invisible utf-8 crap that looks like space, but doesn't act
like it, is just damn impolite by kmail. I assume you weren't even aware
of the random crud you are sending out?

		Linus

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel
Subject: Re: [git pull][resend] Input updates for 2.6.22-rc7
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:32:41 UTC
Message-ID: <fa.JK7VC5VWuIqAU992sthgo8wq3Hg@ifi.uio.no>

On Thu, 5 Jul 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> It says your user-agent is "Kmail", and maybe there is some way to fix it.
> And if kmail is correct, please make a bug-report to the kmail people.

Ok, googling for kmail, I think it really is kmail doing it, because I
find others complaining about the same idiocy.

Btw, the others who noticed this weren't _nearly_ as polite as I am about
kmail.

Apparently kmail - at least when cutting-and-pasting - will actually turn
every other space into an NBSP for some internal idiotic reason. So even
if you _originally_ had 8 spaces, Kmail will apparently corrupt your data
when cutting-and-pasting according to that other report I saw.

Please stop using kmail, or ask for it to get fixed.

I'm constantly surprised by just how _many_ ways MUA's find to screw up.
It's not like they seem to all have some stupid bug. It's more like they
seem to all have willfully added code explicitly to mess up the content of
email, often with the goal of making it "look" right, even if it's crap.

In this case, it means that you cannot cut-and-paste simple ASCII text,
because Kmail messed up.

			Linus

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel
Subject: Re: [git pull][resend] Input updates for 2.6.22-rc7
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 01:11:27 UTC
Message-ID: <fa.IgmANxZoEvqGUWkoZEe414vIYlQ@ifi.uio.no>

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Jesper Juhl wrote:
>
> > I'm constantly surprised by just how _many_ ways MUA's find to screw up.
>
> 'pine' actually seems to work pretty damn well once you disable the
> flowed-text "feature".

Yes. And 'alpine', it's modern version, does even better, but you also
need to make sure to disable "downgrade-multipart-to-text".

I've been using alpine for a while now, and it's nice to see it be utf-8
capable and able to handle other charsets well.

So as a former pine user, I can recommend upgrading.

		Linus

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel
Subject: Re: [git pull][resend] Input updates for 2.6.22-rc7
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 04:06:58 UTC
Message-ID: <fa.VyBHeZAPeQWIsBZtw0NbMovwIDw@ifi.uio.no>

On Thu, 5 Jul 2007, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
>
> I was not... The copy I got from LKML looks fine in Kmail, Gmail and
> MS Outlook.                           ^^^^^^^^^^

That's the problem.

It *looks* *fine*.

The "&nbsp" doesn't look any different from a regular space. There's no
way to tell the difference. Except it doesn't *work* the same. You
cut-and-paste it into a shell window, and that shell window will not
consider a nbsp to be the same thing as a space.

And I don't really understand why Kmail would do something like that. They
obviously do it on purpose, since the nbsp wasn't there originally, so
they literally go do extra work to _corrupt_ the data they cut-and-paste.
Why do it? Who knows. But it's really sad.

			Linus