URLs in email from Launchpad should be in angle brackets

[Morten Kjeldgaard]

When the Launchpad Buildd system sends a mail reporting a build failure, it includes a link to the build log. However, depending on mail client, that URL may or may not be "clickable". Apple Mail.app is notoriously bad at this, because the program does not consider the tilde character to be a valid part of a URL (see attached screendump).

It is very easy to solve this problem: enclose the URL in angle brackets "< ... >", a well defined Internet standard.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Perhaps we should just say all urls in mail should be enclosed.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

Agreed.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

This is not trivial. There is a lot of code and templates working with urls in emails.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

It was trivial to do in the scope the bug was originally reported, and then
Poolie changed the scope :)

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

There is a WONTFIX bug in the same scope as this. We concluded that Lp does not need to work in broken mail readers. "broken" being the description of the issues in known readers. Apples mail.app is the most common example where links are not handled correctly if they are not in angle brackets.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

If we wanted to do this, we could add something to say
<https://dev.launchpad.net/UserInterfaceWording> and then gradually
bring things into compliance. There is some text there that implies
it's already recommended.

Even for perfect mail readers this is a good idea because it reduces
problems with punctuation near the url.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

fwiw putting URLs in angle brackets is recommended (but not mandated) by <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt> and <http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5.1_Wrappers.html>.

If someone wants to fix this, I think, inspecting **/template/*txt will probably find you most of them.