gmail broken with arbitrary, invisible, forced short autowrap

 ... or that's how it looked to me. 

Gmail compose took a long input line, which normally would autowrap within whatever box it was viewed, but instead created a hard, short autowrap, in the background, where I could not see it, and did not want it.

Obviously I'd accidental changed a setting. But I scoured the settings, and couldn't see an option that fit the problem. 

There's another set of settings, weirdly not referenced or linked in the main settings. These are in the compose window. And they don't apply until the next time you open the compose window.

Those settings are under the three dots to the right of the text tools, and the culprit was "plain text mode".

Now as someone who used email decades before there was email formatting, I was a little irked by the assertion implied by this setting's name.

If it was 'plain text' why not just treat the input the way it will be received? Why create an arbitrarily short autowrap of the input text, which will alway look wrong? This is because it's not previewed, that is, it's not WYSIWYG. It turns a potentially useful option into one that would only be useful for sending emails to very primitive small-screen devices, with no option to use plain text in a way that's under control of the sender. 

So, a broken UX in gmail. Which usually is more careful about its features.

Werkzeug ... and who is responsible for code stability?

Don't you love it when you haven't deployed for a few days, and you change something insignificant, and then your deployed app crashes, because of something far outside your purview?

The python Werkzeug WSGI library was just updated to 3.0. This caused Python Flask 2.2.2 web apps running on Google Cloud's App Engine to automatically update. Which, if you use one of the utilities, url_quote, you get this error:

ImportError: cannot import name 'url_quote' from 'werkzeug.urls'

So, yes, I might have caught this by updating and running it first in my local environment. But Google Cloud could have caught this too, creating a stable environment for incremental deployment.

The fix is to add this line to your requirements.txt file:

werkzeug==2.2.2

This reminds me of the whole unnecessary forced move to Flask, with its mixed bag of improvements and problems. It should be possible to run a webapp of any age (at least with configurations since 2008) in Google App Engine. Why all the unnecessary updating, crashing, and subsequent compulsory code obsolescence? What happened to backwards compatability? If it was still an observed principle, it would be easier now than ever. Why the insistence on forcing programmers to chase after the latest thing?