51946 - Remove horizontal bars in notifications

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 65477

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, defect, P3)

Description

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

If you run an recognizer for linebreaks, ascii-art etc in your email app (e.g.
Mozilla Mailnews after I submitted my patches) to make mail look nicer (e.g.
variable width font where appropriate, wrap at window width), bugzilla spam
doesn't look too good.

The worst problem I ran into is that the "------- Additional Comme..." is
recognized as ascii-art, and switched the whole following paragraph to fixed
width font, which is hard to read. I don't know a workaround on the Mozilla side
(other than special-case hacks), so could bugzilla just output an empty line
between "------- Additional Comme..." and the comment itself? That's how it is
outputted on the web version, too.

Also, the long horizontal bar under the diff headers, e.g.
           What    |Old Value                   |New Value 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
                 CC|                            |[e-mail] 
is really long with an variable width font (you should be able to see that even
with stock Mozilla Mailnews) and unnecessarily causes a horzontal scrollbar.
Could we just remove it, or replcae it with iterating spaceas and dashes, e.g.
"- - - ..."? Similar for the "------- Additional Comme..."-line: The  dashes are
not really necessary.

If somebody points me at the right code, I can submit a patch. Would be nice, if
this could go in 2.12.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

code for this is in globals.pl, look for a routine called 
"GetLongDescriptionAsText"

Comment 2

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Yes, thanks. I already found it.

What do you think? Am I selfish or is this a general improvement?

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I like the idea of adding a space after the Additional Comments line.
For the horizontal divider in the activity table though, I think it'll look 
funny in a fixed font if you change it.

Comment 4

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

What if I just insert a space every five or ten dashes?

Comment 5

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

1. Added empty line after "Additional Comments"
2. Insert 1 space every 10 dashes in the long hor. line.
3. Changed pointless "What" to "Field"

I did not change the "Additional Comments" line itself.

Attaching patch. Cyeh, how do we proceed now? Can you r=? Do I need a=? (I have
an CVS account.) When will the changes take effect on bugzilla.mozilla.org?

Comment 6

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Attachment: Fix, version 1

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

installed this patch on my system so I could see what it looks like...  
Additional comments look good.  The broken up horizontal bar looks, um, 
interesting.  :)  It makes it hard to separate out the columns if you only have 
one or two things changed on a bug, for some reason...

Comment 8

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

dave, suggestions welcome. IMO, one long line is a bad idea, you can see this
even on normal readers with a variable width font and a small window (not that
the new mail notification would look good in variable width font :-(, but that's
what I'm trying to change on the client side.)

Comment 9

[Chris Yeh]

can somene paste-in what the output looks like so that others can comment 
easily?

Comment 10

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 19:35:21 -0700
From: InTrec Bugs <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [Bug 195] Changed - test file and testing still

http://bugs.intrec.com/show_bug.cgi?id=195

[e-mail] changed:

           Field   |Old Value                   |New Value
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- 
   Target Milestone|---                         |A
           Priority|P2                          |P3



------- Additional Comments From [e-mail]  2000-09-14 19:35 -------

changing a few things and adding a comment to see what the comment and change 
text will look like.  Typing a little bit more so we have enough to make a three 
line paragraph.

Comment 11

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

What about this now?

Comment 12

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

with the mail flags created with the mail notification preferences (see bug 
17464), It would probably be easily doable now to have it output a few different 
ways, and let the user pick one.  Heck, might even have an HTML choice with the 
changes in an actual table (not by default of course - many email programs hate 
HTML).

Comment 13

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Yes, a simple (ocde human-readable) HTML table would be ultra-cool! Can you file
a bug and cc me?

Comment 14

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

what's the status on this?  still plan to do something with this for 2.12 or is 
it worth holding off for 2.14 in order to implement bug 65477 instead of this 
one, and make the suggestion here be one of those options in that one?

Comment 15

[Tara Hernandez]

I vote with Dave on this.  Let's close this out in favor of the other but.
Marking as a (psuedo) dupe just so the info gets recorded in the other bug.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 65477 ***

Comment 16

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Tara, please fix it on 2.12. It is annoying and has a workaround. You can still
include the better fix in 2.14. REOPENing to trigger a reaction.

Comment 17

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

And the workaround is annoying for people who like the old way (like me).

I vote to wait for the ability for the user to pick one.

Comment 18

[Tara Hernandez]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 65477 ***

Comment 19

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

This isn't entirely a dupe but I'll verify it as such because I wouldn't want
the spaces either.

Comment 20

[Dawn Endico]

Unsetting target milestone so we can delete the old (inappropriate)
Mozilla target milestones from Webtools.

Comment 21

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

moving to Bugzilla product
reassign to default owner/qa for INVALID/WONTFIX/WORKSFORME/DUPLICATE