I finally got around to investigating how to have a
language-independant attribution string in replies.
The default for most English software is something of the form:
On _date and time_, _author's name_ wrote:
The problem is that:
- this is an English sentence.
- the date and time are written in English too.
The solution I found was to:
- not use a sentence.
- write the date as numbers only, and in an order which is clear (e.g.
not MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY).
I have decided to use an adaptation Sven Guckes's attribution format[1]:
* FirstName LastName <Address> [YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS+ZZZZ]
The information needed about the author of the original message is
prensent: real name, email address. The date follows the ISO 8601[2]
specification.
In order to get this with Mutt[4], I set the following:
set attribution="* %n <%a> [%d]"
set date_format="!%Y-%m-%d %T%Z"
Well, my understanding of strftime(3) makes me think that the right
date_format should be "!%Y-%m-%d %T%z", but there is apparently a bug
in the handling of strftime's %z paramater[3].
I cannot do that with SLRN[5] yet, but the upcoming version (0.9.7.0)
will have a followup_date_format variable to set the date format.
1.
http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/faq/attribution.html
2.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
3.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mutt-dev/message/10231
4.
http://www.mutt.org/
5.
http://www.slrn.org/
--
Hugo Haas <
[email protected]> -
http://larve.net/people/hugo/
La vraie paresse, c'est de se lever � 6 heures du matin pour avoir plus
longtemps � ne rien faire. -- Tristan Bernard