On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 02:00:46PM +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2010-08-02, Nicolas Williams <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Right.  There's no good convention for "end of list of arguments to an
> > option".  There's only a good convention for "end of variable argument
> > list" ('--'), and since this is the closest thing...
> 
> And since there _is_ a convention that '--' ends the option list, it's
> A Bad Thing(TM) to use it for something else.  I think violating the
> almost universal convention about what '--' means is a terrible idea,
> but apparently we're now stuck with it.

It's not just an "almost universal convention" ... it's actually a
POSIX standard.  I never liked the idea when it was proposed, but
wasn't aware that it was a standard at that time.  A better way to
handle this is to allow mutt to accept a delimiter-separated list of
filenames, so you can do stuff like:

  $ mutt [...] -a "`echo *|tr ' ' \"$DELIMITER\""` $RECIPIENT
  
or something of the sort.  Of course, then you have either the
spaces-in-filenames problem, or the delimiter-in-filenames problem.
Or both.

> The standard way to pass a list of filenames on a command line is to
> do it indirectly by putting the filenames in a file, and passing that
> filename.  That seems to work fine for dozens (or hundreds) of other
> programs, so I don't see any reason why mutt shouldn't follow that
> convention.

Or that.  Seems fine to me, though it's definitely less convenient if
you want to attach, say, *.jpg to your message.  Adds a couple of
steps.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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