[BUG/PATCH v2 1/2] emacs: Fix header problem in reply for emacs 23.2

[Adam Wolfe Gordon]

Hi Mark,

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 03:13, Mark Walters <markwalters1009 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Secondly it seems a little odd that the second patch above changes the
> header stuff from 'From to "From" and then this patch changes it back
> again. This is probably only a matter of a tidy history but I have to
> admit I am confused about why the reply from alternate address still
> works (but it does seem to)

Good question. These three bugs (alternate address, References header,
double headers in 23.2) basically stem from two problems: poor
interactions between notmuch and message.el, and inconsistency in
using strings and symbols for header names.

All the message.el functions usually assume symbols for header names,
but when I was writing the new reply stuff I found it easier to use
strings. In emacs 23.3, message.el is happy to accept strings. The
alternate address bug was caused by the fact that we were using
strings in one place and symbols in another, and 'From isn't equal to
"From". Rather than changing everything to symbols, I just changed the
one place we were using symbols to use strings.

But, it turns out that emacs 23.2 isn't happy with strings, which
caused the double headers bug. So I ended up converting everything to
use symbols. Because we're now consistent in using symbols, and never
pass strings to message.el, the alternate address bug is still fixed.

All that's a long way of saying: the fix for emacs 23.2 should
actually fix the alternate reply bug as well. This probably means I
could drop the alternate reply bug patch, and rebase the other two
onto master, and we'd still have all the bugs fixed. Is that
preferable, to reduce the number of code changes in the history?

-- Adam