On Sep 9, 2013 10:43 AM, "John J. McDonough" <wb8rcr@arrl.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 09:59 -0400, Ben Cotton wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 5:56 AM, Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > How about an actual reply instead?
> >
> > > Is this XML source layout the preferred style, or would it be considered
> > > okay to wrap long lines as a separate change before making actual content
> > > changes?
> > >
> > Certainly not preferred by me. :-) I generally set textwidth=80 when I
> > work on the docs, just to keep the lines (and thus diffs) manageable,
> > but it varies wildly. If you want to wrap the lines, I heartily
> > endorse this.
>
> I think the long lines do help a bit with the diffs, but to tell the
> truth, I prefer shorter lines, sometimes, depending on the phase of the
> moon, very short.  I suspect there is some editor somewhere that isn't
> much affected by long lines, because they do appear a lot.
>
> --McD
>

I use org-indent-mode in emacs. I've been trying to get more familiar with vim and I suspect it also has a mode to wrap text on display without inserting actual newlines. Probably Ben's textwidth=80?

If we agree that 80 columns or whatever is preferred, we should find/write a script that would both limit column width and enforce indents to preserve XML inheritance for clarity, and run the script on all our sources in one go. Then share $editor settings going forward.

I'm fairly sure publican doesn't care about whitespace and newlines when building, but I'd like to confirm before doing something drastic - and also confirm extra strings aren't produced when generating POs. Just to be sure.

--Pete