Re: Balsa can't download a mail with a long line, gets stuck in endless dup-creating loop.

[Rob Landley <rob landley net>]

On 10/24/2012 06:51:15 PM, Jack wrote:
> Because web mail is too painful for me, I'll just add a few comments
> up top.
> 
> I have occasionally noticed problems with word wrap, but much of the
> time, 
> either I'm on webmail, or I'm replying (in balsa) to something sent 
> in
> webmail.  
> I think part of the issue is that a series of several lines, all 
> about
>  the same 
> length looks like a paragraph, but isn't really.  There is a hard
> break between 
> each, instead of being flowed only by the display.

Why? Strange design...

That said, if they're going to _treat_ it as a paragraph maybe it 
should act like one? Email paragraphs have blank lines between them, if 
you don't see one of those you need to flow ahead.

It also CREEPS ME OUT that I type for a while and then when I stop 
typing for a second or so it decides to change the wordwrapping 
decisions for its previous lines, so that the whole paragraph changes 
when I pause to think about what to type next. It's distracting and 
disturbing, but also inconsistent and unnecessary. It says that there 
are two codepaths that control word wrapping. Why the extra unnecessary 
code?

>  Inserting  into
> one of those 
> lines add's a wrap to that paragraph only, and if that  paragraph is
> only one 
> line, you get what you are complaining about.  I do make frequent use
> of 
> "reflow" (select the paragraph, perhaps without the last line, and 
> hit
> CTL-R.
> 
> In ubuntu, the deps are just the runtime libraries.  When you build
> balsa 
> yourself, you need the -devel version so you have the headers
> available.

I've noticed this thing. It's the fact it needs so MANY of them, and 
there's no easy way I've found to say "give me the -dev versions of all 
the dependencies for this package", unless maybe I'm installing a 
source .deb which is a rathole I haven't gone down yet.

>  For 
> example, if the ubuntu packaged version of balsa needs ssh, then to
> build balsa, 
> you need ssh-devel (just for the idea, I don't know if that's a real
> package).  

Hence the long list of blah-devel packages I've already installed, yes. 
I just can't get one big list of them from anywhere, and am somewhat 
disturbed at the sheer quantity of environmental dependencies. (If I 
built a beyond linux from scratch variant I'd have to install something 
like 40 prerequisite packages to use balsa.)

> These are not nested dependencies, but development versions of the
> package so 

The nested dependencies are "getting the list of non-dev packages this 
thing uses so I can look for corresponding -dev packages". (I learned a 
lot about making RPM do tricks until Red Hat abandoned the desktop for 
Sun's old enterprise market, and I learned a bit about portage until it 
collapsed under its own weight, and for dpkg I just went "screw it" and 
installed aptitude and try to ignore the horrible layers of apt-get and 
dpkg-query under the surface.)

> you have the headers balsa needs to compile and link, not just to 
> run.

I know what a development package is, thanks. I'm incovenienced by the 
sheer quantity of them which balsa requires. Its environmental 
dependencies are more elaborate than I expected for something claiming 
to be lightweight. They seem not to factor in "my 1 megabyte program 
requires 600 megabytes of library code" as a complexity cost.

>  You do 
> also have the issue of dependencies of dependencies, but other than
> reading the 
> .configure script, finding a new one each time you do .configure is
> the standard 
> approach.

I noticed. The packages I listed were just the ones I manually 
installed, not the ones the dependencies added. (I.E. those half-dozen 
packages actually installed something like 40 packages, and balsa still 
wants more).

> Your send problem seems strange.  When I get a send error (usually 
> due
> to my 
> ISP) I just un-flag and then send queued mail.

For some reason the composer's send button now says "queue" 
and then I have to "send queued messages" from the pull-down menu.

It wasn't doing that earlier. This is unrelated to the "it ignores the 
first message in the outbox whenever it does send" problem.

> If it's still not going, I'd try 
> to figure out why.  Try the command line flag to debug the pop
> connection.

I didn't know there was one. And outgoing mail is debugging the smtp 
connection, pop is only for incoming messages.

Rob