Subject: Re: bug#2588: 23.0.90; Man buffer improperly formatted - wrong width

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:07:44 +0200

> From: Chong Yidong <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Drew Adams <[email-masked]>,  [email-masked]
> Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:43:50 -0500
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> >> > One thing we could easily do is not set COLUMNS in the environment if
> >> > pop-up-frames is being used,
> >> 
> >> Yes, please do that. Please do not set COLUMNS to the current `frame-width'.
> >
> > Yidong, is this solution fine with you?
> 
> The width of a pop-up frame has, in general, nothing to do with the
> default value of COLUMNS (or the default value that the formatter
> assumes if COLUMNS is omitted).  So I don't see how this is any
> improvement.

It is an "improvement" in the sense that, when pop-up-frames is
non-nil, Emacs 23 will behave like Emacs 20 did.

AFAICS, we started setting COLUMNS in the environment because on some
GNU/Linux system, under X, not setting it would result in over-long
lines.  To avoid that with pop-up-frames, we could set COLUMNS to the
value 80.  For a frame that is not yet created, 80 sounds like a
better default than the width of some other frame/window.