[Kde-print-devel] kdeprintfax and phone numbers

[Cristian Tibirna]

Thank you very much for the very careful look that you have on kdeprinfax.

As I didn't write that code, I won't be able to comment on the reasons that 
influenced the decisions to sanitization. As a maintainer, I'd be more than 
happy if you would accept to take care of this issue. Let's hope that the 
author of the code will find a little time to answer.

I think that anything that helps usability (i.e. removes tedious tasks from 
user's hands) is good. If you already gathered the knowledge needed to fix 
this problem, please do so. On the other hand, we should try to avoid 
over-configurability.

I marked 113421 a duplicate of 106369 simply because they were reporting the 
same problem. The fact that 113421 mentions (in passing) a possible solution 
is in no way wasted. I had already had joted down this detail and I was 
intending to use it when I got to this.

So, by all means, please consider writing the appropriate patches and submit 
them to the list for discussion.

Thanks

On 21 April 2006 23:20, Ray Lischner wrote:
> I've been taking a look at kdeprintfax lately, and I was puzzled by the
> way it sanitizes phone numbers. If I write "555-1212" as the phone
> number, I want to use "555-1212" as the phone number, not "5551212".
> It's easy to patch the code to eliminate the number sanitizing, but I
> was curious and searched the bug database.
>
> Bug 121413 presents a solid argument against sanitization. At the very
> least "#" should be allowed through.
>
> Bug 113421 presents another argument against sanitizing. The back-end
> fax program might have any number of uses for non-numeric characters.
> For example mgetty+sendfax can use its own fax database, and maybe the
> user wants to enter a keyword to search that database instead of
> entering the actual phone number. I can see no good reason for
> kdeprintfax to interfere.
>
> And why can't I supply a fax number of, say, +1 800-1FAX-NOW, if that is
> how someone advertises their fax number? My fax backend knows how to
> change that number into something the modem can handle. Right now,
> kdeprintfax forces me to do that change manually, even though computers
> are much better at that kind of task than people.
>
> On the other hand, we have bugs 106369 and 69263, which argue that
> kdeprintfax should prevent the user from making certain errors.
> Apparently, the developers found these arguments persuasive.
>
> I don't understand, however, why 113421 is marked as a duplicate of
> 106369. I find the solution in 113421 to be an excellent idea. Users
> who want safety can use %number, which should be the default. Power
> users can change their fax command lines to use %rawnumber. Everyone is
> happy, at the cost of maybe 4 lines of code.
>
> So what's the problem with %rawnumber?

-- 
Cristian Tibirna
KDE developer .. tibirna at kde.org .. http://www.kde.org