1009585 - Need relnote and documentation about new reply header preferences design (Bug 995797); consider migration for discarded pref mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote;

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Rinaldi J. Montessi]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0 SeaMonkey/2.29a1 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140512134446

Steps to reproduce:

Reply to a mail or newsgroup post.


Actual results:

(Someone) wrote:


Expected results:

(Someone) $MYPREFSTRING

mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote;%s decreed, Read These Runes!

Comment 1

[Hartmut Figge]

Regression window, in case the change was not intentionally done ;)

Last good: 2014-04-23 16:13:00 PDT mc-33ca5e321046 cc-711cff832014
First bad: 2014-04-24 16:18:00 PDT mc-5ecd532a167e cc-2d5ceaf7ac97

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

Thunderbird is broken as well, hence moving to MailNews Core.
Neither of the mailnews.reply_header_* prefs is working.

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

Slightly different m-c regression window for Thunderbird:

Last good: 2014-04-24 03:02:03 PDT mc-c8055a00235d cc-711cff832014
First bad: 2014-04-25 03:02:01 PDT mc-b836d89be72b cc-2d5ceaf7ac97

Comment 4

[rsx11m]

https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/graph/16083?revcount=12

This looks like a feasible candidate:
* Bug 995797 - Improve localizability of the reply header string

It appears that this bug introduced some new preferences without migrating the old ones (specifically, there are three preferences now for the whole string with #1, #2, #3 place holders, selected from by the chosen reply_header.type).

aceman, anything missing?

Comment 5

[rsx11m]

Ok, so the old set of mailnews.reply_header_* prefs has been replaced by the following:

  mailnews.reply_header_authorwrotesingle, "#1 wrote:"            (type 1)
  mailnews.reply_header_ondateauthorwrote, "On #2 #3, #1 wrote:"  (type 2)
  mailnews.reply_header_authorwroteondate, "#1 wrote on #2 #3:"   (type 3)

which indeed is much more flexible than the old system distributing this across multiple preferences and the right step towards full templates as suggested in bug 107884. As such, I'm tempted to declare this bug invalid given that it's the intended behavior, unless indeed some migration code from the old to the new system should be provided (but then, these are hidden preferences, where SeaMonkey at least exposes the reply-header type in the Mail & News > Composition preferences UI). Maybe just relnote it?

Comment 6

[:aceman]

Yes, I wanted to preserve mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote but unfortunately the pref name is tied to a string ID in a .properties file. And we need to change the string ID when the string text changes. So I had to change the pref. If somebody can come up with a clever way to migrate the old value, we could do it.

Comment 7

[Hartmut Figge]

It could help if the examples of Comment 5 would be in omni.ja#defaults/pref/mailnews.js. They were useful for me.

Comment 8

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I think we should just relnote that the format changes, and add better documentation in mailnews.js

Comment 9

[:aceman]

OK, what documentation is needed?

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Something like comment 5. Partly it's already documented in the properties file, but it could be useful to have it in mailnews.js

Comment 11

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

If someone can write a sumo doc on the changes, I can link to them from the release notes.

Comment 12

[rsx11m]

Guess this got lost for the renotes, at least nothing is seen on
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/31.0/releasenotes/

Comment 13

[rsx11m]

(ok, so it got lost because there is no sumo doc - oh well...)

Comment 14

[Vincent P.]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #9)
> OK, what documentation is needed?

I believe the following document surly needs to be updated by the developer for a complete understanding.  I can confirm though that the comment below does in fact work for custom reply headers. The document needing update is as follows.  

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reply_header_settings



(In reply to rsx11m from comment #5)
> Ok, so the old set of mailnews.reply_header_* prefs has been replaced by the
> following:
> 
>   mailnews.reply_header_authorwrotesingle, "#1 wrote:"            (type 1)
>   mailnews.reply_header_ondateauthorwrote, "On #2 #3, #1 wrote:"  (type 2)
>   mailnews.reply_header_authorwroteondate, "#1 wrote on #2 #3:"   (type 3)
> 
> which indeed is much more flexible than the old system distributing this
> across multiple preferences and the right step towards full templates as
> suggested in bug 107884. As such, I'm tempted to declare this bug invalid
> given that it's the intended behavior, unless indeed some migration code
> from the old to the new system should be provided (but then, these are
> hidden preferences, where SeaMonkey at least exposes the reply-header type
> in the Mail & News > Composition preferences UI). Maybe just relnote it?