Hello! I have some thoughts and questions regarding a few of mmh’s… older attributes.
What does the MH format do for us? If the intent of this project is to modernize nmh, then what is MH doing to pull its weight- why is it exempt from being “modernized”? As it stands, the only way to actually sync mmh with a mailserver is to convert maildir or mbox to MH. Every single time you sync. With the help of this mailing list, I’ve written a script (which I’ve aptly named ‘inc’) to pull new content from my mailserver to a maildir, then move that into mmh using rcvstore. But, pushing content back to the mailserver quickly becomes problematic. There are a number of things I could try, but as far as I know, the best solution is a 3-way sync program written explicitly to solve this problem- that is, it’s a hack written by mmh/nmh users for mmh/nmh users. No offense to the developer intended. To my mind, this is insane. Why treat the symptom with an *extraordinarily* complicated and highly specialized solution, rather than simply addressing the *actual issue at hand*: the MH format is too old. To interface with modern software, we need to update mmh to use maildir. Another oddity to me as a new user is the separation of ‘pick’ and ‘scan’. How much sense does it actually make that these are two separate utilities? As best I can tell, all this accomplishes is extra typing, usually with ungraceful use of backquotes (scan `pick -from whoever`). I imagine that the vast majority of times someone does a search, they intend to view the results of that search in human readable form. Requiring an additional command to convert to human readable form is not logical to me. What would you all think of combing pick’s functionality into scan, giving scan a format file that replicates pick’s output? Deprecate pick. Thanks for hearing me out. I know I’m new and I may not have as deep an understanding of the underlying mechanics at play, but sometimes it helps to have an outsider’s feedback to put things into perspective. -Link
