> > Why the first instead of the last? Maybe because that's the way Bruce Borden > > happened to program reading the lines of .mh_profile, one afternoon during > > the > > American Civil War? Or is there a better reason? > >if the search order was "system-installed file first", then using the >last match would make sense. but since the user's profile comes >first, it has to be able to override the system setting, otherwise it >would be useless. > >the fact that the $MHSHOW/$MHBUILD etc variables come in between makes >no sense -- one would usually view an environment variable as a >high-priority override, but not in this case.
I think some of this might be simple oversight. The way readconfig() is implemented now, a new profile entry won't override an existing one. So like Paul said, it makes sense to read the files you want to override everything else first. I went back and looked; MHSHOW was always read after .mh_profile was loaded (MHSHOW was added for nmh). But thinking about this, this doesn't really make sense; you'd think a program-specific environment variable should override .mh_profile. So maybe this is a case that Richard Coleman didn't really think this through, or it was a simple bug, or he had reasons for doing it that we don't know. I think it would make more sense to have MHSHOW profile entries override .mh_profile(), but that's a post-1.6 change I think. --Ken _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
