RFC: User-Agent header

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:12:47 -0700, Dirk Hohndel <hohndel at infradead.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:26:01 +0200, "Sebastian Spaeth" <Sebastian at SSpaeth.de> wrote:
>
> > No patch yet, just asking if this is a good idea or not.

Yes. A fine idea.

> I think it's a very good idea. But it should be something that includes
> the other components of how you send email...
> 
> Like
> 
> User-Aget: Emacs 23 Message-mode / notmuch-0.1.1

A quick grep through some of my recent mails does show precedent for
this kind of thing:

  User-Agent: Gnus/5.110011 (No Gnus v0.11) Emacs/23.1.90 (gnu/linux)

Unsurprisingly, these suer-agent strings can become arbitrarily
unwieldy:

  User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Lightning/1.0pre Thunderbird/3.0.4

Or extremely simple:

  User-Agent: Sup/0.11

I don't see the advantage of duplicating the name and version in the
parenthesized comment, but here's an idea that looks useful:

  User-Agent: Loom/3.14 (http://gmane.org/)

So I propose something like:

  User-Agent: Notmuch/0.2 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.1.1 (gnu/linux)

If anybody wants to start assembling a patch to generate that, that
would be great.

-Carl


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