Re: Improving the WHOIS format

On 12/01/2012 13:55, Dwayne Henderson wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Jase Thew <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>
>     Have you thought about all the people that are quite happy with this
>     formatting? Why should they have to change their themes due to a
>     change to just to suit your tastes?
>
>     The entire point of theming is that if you don't like the default,
>     you are free to change it locally to something you do like.
>
>     Jase.
>
> They don't have to change a thing. What I meant was fixing it from the
> source. It ain't about personal taste, just a desire to fix what's
> incomplete and incorrect.
>
> --Dwayne

I undertsand what you're suggesting, but it appears you may have 
misinterpreted the point I was raising :

 >      Have you thought about all the people that are quite happy with 
 >      this formatting? Why should they have to change their themes due 
 >      to a change to just to suit your tastes?

I was referring to people being happy with the *existing* formatting and 
how they would need to change their themes to keep that formatting 
should we change the default values as you propose.

Irssi has default values for all of its formats stored internally (as a 
result of being defined in the source), so it will only save (to a theme 
file) formats that have had their value set (which I will call a custom 
value) in the current session (either manually via /format or by loading 
a theme file). The exception to this is when /save -formats is used 
instead of just /save. This causes *all* formats and their values to be 
written out to the theme file, not just the formats that have 
non-default values. Furthermore, if a custom value is not present Irssi 
will use its default value for that format when printformat'ing.

So let's take the example of the whois formats you propose to change and 
let's assume there are a group of people who are happy with the existing 
default values for these formats. These people will not have any 
references to these formats in their theme file, so Irssi renders the 
whois output using its default values for these formats.

Now suppose we change the default value for these formats as you propose 
- this would affect everyone who doesn't have a custom value for these 
formats. With the aforementioned people, if they wanted to keep the 
whois formatting they were already happy with, they would need to 
configure custom values in their theme file.

So yes, changing the default value of formats will impact those people 
who have not overridden them and will affect those who are happy with 
the existing default values. Forcing such a change makes sense when a 
format's value is clearly incomplete or erroneous and needs to be 
corrected, but none whatsoever when the change is unnecessarily cosmetic 
at best.

Jase.