Bug#822463: perl: perlbug reports get rejected by exim4 due to long lines in 'perl -V'

[Niko Tyni]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 09:46:02PM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:

> The patch looks good. However the example output looks ugly for me
> (particuarly the 100-char one, where most of the patch descriptions
> are uglified by a wrapping out of sync with my 80 character terminal).

I see. The lowest common denominator would indeed be 80 characters.
The problem with wrapping there is that some of the "normal" lines like

    intsize=4, longsize=8, ptrsize=8, doublesize=8, byteorder=12345678, doublekind=3

currently go over that, and it seems silly to wrap those.
 
> If we are wrapping for technical reasons rather than aesthetic ones,
> then the choice of max length should be based on those technical reasons.
> From [1] the maximum line length appears to be around the 1000 character
> area. So call it 900 to be safe? I don't think we should wrap more
> aggressively than is required to fit within that standard; that way, we
> minimise the damage caused by wrapping, when displayed by MUAs which
> themselves wrap.

I suppose you're right. Not sure if it makes sense to intend the wrapped
line at all in that case.

> I'm not sure what sort of warning is necessary; could you be more
> specific here?

We aren't wrapping everything (at least the environment dump and
the actual user-supplied text aren't modified by the patch), so it's
still possible to hit the limit. I was thinking about documenting this
possibility and advising users to keep well under the limit.

A better fix would be be to wrap everything, but I don't have a good patch
for that. Hacking build_complete_message() could work I guess, but it's
not used by all the sending backends (at least _send_message_mailsend();
not sure we need to care about that.)

I think I need to look at this a bit more.

Thanks for your input, much appreciated!
-- 
Niko