The purpose of this email is to propose that the expectation that emails should be wrapped at 80 characters when they are sent should be dropped.
Currently, the code of conduct for the mailing lists says: "Wrap your lines at 80 characters or less for ordinary discussion. Lines longer than 80 characters are acceptable for computer-generated output (e.g., ls -l).” https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/ I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I received an email from a Debian Developer complaining that replies from my email client (KMail) looked odd because they truncated quoted lines in a way that did not lay out pleasingly. This was because I had set KMail to wrap lines at 80 characters. The purpose of that email was to explain that KMail should be more intelligent in the way it wrapped the quoted lines, which is a fair point, although KMail handles things better than some of the emails I receive on the lists from time to time. However, from a technical perspective, having the *sending* program decide where line breaks should be in an email doesn’t seem like the correct approach to me because, 1) the sending program does not know the screen width of the receiving program, and 2) there is large variability in the screen width of receiving devices, including cell phones who are often less than 80 characters wide. I understand that there are historical reasons for the 80 character limit, but I believe that it is time to reassess best practices. My recommendation is that sending email programs should not wrap text at an arbitrary column, and that all wrapping of text should be handled by the receiving program, which is, of course, the only program that has insight into the width of the screen where the email is currently being displayed. I have composed this email without an arbitrary column wrap, so that those receiving it can see how it is handled by their various clients and devices. -- Soren Stoutner so...@debian.org
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