Dual content (text/plain and text/html) on xen-devel (was Re: Linux PV domU with >1 vCPU never resumes after xl save/restore)

[George Dunlap <gwd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Adding back in xen-devel, since this is relevant]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2026 at 9:15 PM Jürgen Groß <jgross@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 04.08.26 11:34, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2026 at 6:45 PM Jürgen Groß <jgross@xxxxxxxx
> <mailto:jgross@xxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>
>
>     P.S.: George, would it be possible to turn off HTML mails when sending to
>             xen-devel?
>
>
> I see both a text/plain part and a text/html part in the mail I sent; isn't the
> presence of a text/plain version sufficient?
>
> Obviously sending patches is a different matter; but for that I'll be using git-
> send-email.

This is a reply to your mail using Thunderbird (which I have configured to use
plain text format as the default, in order to comply with most mailing lists
I'm using).

I don't think Thunderbird is an exotic MUA, but please have a look how it
rendered your HTML reply to my original mail. I can't see clearly which part
was written by me originally and was cited by you in this mail.

Thanks, this is what I was looking for.

Attached is the message Gmail sent.  As you can see, text/plain uses normal `>` for quotes.

That makes me think that the problem is in Thunderbird.  It should either take the text/plan part, and reply to that as though it were the only part it had received; or it should take the HTML part, and convert the quotes to text properly.  Replying in HTML and then rendering it with only space indentations seems like a bug.

Thunderbird certainly isn't exotic, but last time I used it it was definitely under-maintained.

You're asking every person who sends an email to xen-devel to remember to take an action before sending the mail (or to send *all* mail as text/plain, even if it's not to xen-devel), because your MUA isn't handling the standard properly.  Is that really reasonable?  Couldn't you tell Thunderbird to ignore html and only render text/plain?

 -George

Attachment: quoted-reply.txt
Description: Text document