Re: Mail mode vs message mode

[Chong Yidong]

Reiner Steib <address@hidden> writes:

>> (defcustom message-from-style
>>     (if (featurep 'xemacs) 'angles mail-from-style)
>>     ....)
>
> I don't like this.  The current default value of message-from-style
> tries to avoid quoting if possible and therefore is preferable to
> `angles'.  BTW, message-mode doesn't handle the value
> `system-default'.

We should switch the mail-mode default to `angles'.  Not sure what to do
about the `system-default' setting; maybe we should deprecate it, as I'm
not sure it's useful anymore.

> If I understand the correctly, the goal is not to provide full
> compatibility with mail-mode but to have a default mail composition
> mode that handles MIME correctly.  So how about simply providing a
> function, say `message-initalize-from-mail-mode' that initializes
> message variables and hooks from the corresponding mail-mode ones?

One minor problem: Customize would complain about the value being
changed from the default.  In general, it's not nice to set the default
value of a variable outside of its defcustom, as that can lead to
confusion.

We can do it your way if you really object to making the message-mode
options default to the corresponding mail-* options, but I'd like to
know the reasoning first.  (If any of the default values for the mail-*
options grate, like mail-from-style, we can change them.)