Re: comments in .mailrc treated inconsistently

[Roland Winkler]

On Mon Aug 22 2005 Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>     The functions build-mail-abbrevs and build-mail-aliases are very
>     similar. However, build-mail-abbrevs ignores comments (anything in a
>     line that follows `# ') while build-mail-aliases doesn't do that.
> 
> Why does it matter?  The code in build-mail-aliases only looks
> for certain kinds of lines, which start with `source' or `alias'
> or `group'.  Comment lines ought to be ignored anyway, as far
> as I can see.
> 
> Have you encountered a particular case that fails?
> If so, please send a precise test case, and I'll debug it.

Here is an example:

alias smith address@hidden # great guy

build-mail-abbrevs removes such a comment at the end of a line so
that `smith' expands to address@hidden'. On the other hand,
build-mail-aliases yields a rather meaningless 
address@hidden, #, great, guy'.

The patch below fixes this so that the behavior of
build-mail-aliases becomes consistent with the behavior of
build-mail-abbrevs. The new lines were simply copied from
build-mail-abbrevs in mailabbrev.el.

As I said, I do not know whether programs like /bin/mail understand
such comments. But I find these comments very helpful to organize
the entries in my .mailrc. The reason I want to put the comments in
the same line like an alias is that then I can much easier shuffle
the lines in my .mailrc.

Should this behavior be documented in the docstrings of
build-mail-aliases and build-mail-abbrevs and in the info node
(emacs)Mail Aliases? Only by digging into the code of
build-mail-abbrevs I discovered that the feature I wanted partly
exists already.

Roland


--- mailalias.el~       2005-03-26 03:13:35.000000000 +0100
+++ mailalias.el        2005-08-22 15:20:11.000000000 +0200
@@ -265,6 +265,12 @@
            (goto-char (point-max))
            (or (eq (preceding-char) ?\n) (newline))
            (goto-char (point-min))
+            ;; Delete comments from the file
+            (while (search-forward "# " nil t)
+              (let ((p (- (point) 2)))
+                (end-of-line)
+                (delete-region p (point))))
+            (goto-char (point-min))
            ;; handle "\\\n" continuation lines
            (while (not (eobp))
              (end-of-line)