[ih] Fwd: Reporter query on the history of greater-than in quoted replies

[Tony Finch]

Sorry, this has turned into more of a running commentary than I expected,
but I think I have run out of places I can look now.

4.3BSD includes a couple of newsreaders, both of which have > quote
support. In rn,

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-4_3-Snapshot-Development/usr/contrib/rn/common.h#L675
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-4_3-Snapshot-Development/usr/contrib/rn/respond.c#L340

common.h:EXT char *indstr INIT(">");    /* indent for old article embedded in followup */

The reply() and followup() functions both have copies of the this code,

respond.c-      fseek(artfp,(long)htype[PAST_HEADER].ht_minpos,0);
respond.c-      while (fgets(buf,LBUFLEN,artfp) != Nullch) {
respond.c:          fprintf(tmpfp,"%s%s",indstr,buf);
respond.c-      }
respond.c-      fprintf(tmpfp,"\n");

The code in /usr/contrib/news/ is missing from the unix-history-repo but
it is present in Mckusick's CSRG archives. In news/src/postnews.c there is
prep_article() which does

                fprintf(tf, "In article %s, %s writes:\n", msgid, isfrom);
                while (fgets(buf, BUFSIZ, of) != NULL)
                        fprintf(tf, "> %s", buf);
                (void) fclose(of);

There is also a copy of mh-e (the Emacs interface to MH) which includes

(defvar mh-ins-buf-prefix ">> "
  "*String to put before each non-blank line of the the current message
as it is inserted in an outgoing letter.")

In the CSRG archives copy of 4.2BSD, there is no emacs nor rn. None of
mh nor the news code nor rnews.ml (emacs news reader) seem to have any
support for quoting the original message in a reply.

So it seems this convention emerged on Usenet some time between 4.2BSD
(1983) and 4.3BSD (1986).

Tony.
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