On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 6:29 AM, Richard Guenther <rguent...@suse.de> wrote: > On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: > >> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 6:08 AM, Richard Guenther <rguent...@suse.de> wrote: >> >> > The initial patch, split between rev. 31343 and 31999 indeed added >> >> Thanks for helping tracking history. >> >> > + /* Enable automatic line wrapping by default */ >> > + set_message_length (72); >> > >> > to C++ lang_decode_option. Later it got appearantly lost somehow, >> > probably during some of the Great Option Reorgs. >> >> Yes, most likely. >> >> > >> > I still think automatic wrapping (at 72 columns!? A terminal >> > is 80x24!) should not be done by default. >> >> The choice of 72 at the time was based on the 80 of the terminal >> and Emacs guidelines. > > I see (and yes, editors probably do not break lines by default - but > my terminals do, and I usually enlarge them to be able to decipher > C++ diagnostics).
These days, it is common for terminals to have line wrap. At the time, it wasn't common. Another suggestion I have heard when the line break was introduced, was to do it based on the characteristics of the output stream -- for example, adding colors (hello Benjamin!) which I believe SuSE added, and which demands testing the output stream. Another suggestion was people wanted to look at COLUMNS to automatically set the line length -- this comes from people using more than 80. -fmessage-length=0 had an internal necessity: the testsuites. I modified the testsuite framework to automatically set the length to 0. > I still think that not breaking existing consumers > is more important than to restore something that hasn't been in > effect for years. > > Oh, and yes, making documentation match reality is an improvement. > > Let's wait for Jason to break the tie. > > Richard.
