[Xen-devel] Formatting of emails which are comments on patches.

[Ian Jackson <Ian.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Someone wrote:
) On 11/04/12 14:17, Dario Faggioli wrote:
) ) [9 lines of quoted prose]
) [3 lines of replying prose]
) )
) ) [1 line of quoted prose]
) )
) ) Signed-off-by: Dario Faggioli<dario.faggioli@xxxxxxxxxx)
) )
) ) [16 lines of diff, quoted without any elision]
) [4 lines of prose]
) 
) [2 lines of prose]
) 
) [3 lines of prose]
) 
) [2 lines of prose]
) ) [71 lines of diff, quoted without any elision]
) [1 line of prose]
) ) [64 lines of diff, quoted without any elision]

etc.  (I have replaced ">" with ")" to try to subvert email programs
which do something special with quoted text so that you can see what
it looks like to me.)

This is unnecessarily hard to read.  What it looks like on my screen
can be seen here:
  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/2012/email-formatting.png

Can I ask people to:

 * Trim diffs when replying to patches.  There is no need to quote the
   whole patch.  Just quote the parts which are needed to understand
   your comments.

 * Leave a blank line between quoted text of any kind and your own 
   added text.

That will help your comments stand out, and be read.  This is
particularly important if the quoted patches come to more than 80
columns, because then there are lots of breaks in the ">" down the
left hand side due to wrap damage and they are hard to tell from
interspersed comments.

Thanks and sorry to be picky.

Ian.

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