Ken Hornstein writes: > >> So you want the default behavior of mhl to simply dump out the complete > >> body of a message, without doing any MIME decoding at all? That just > >> seems lousy to me, and also incredibly non-useful. Are people depending > >> on that behavior? > > > >Well yeah, I think that people should have to flip a switch to get the new > >behavior. Avoids the "breaking things" surprises. > > The problem I have with that is ... it just sucks. > > I can't imagine that anyone thinks the current behavior of mhn on MIME > messages is reasonable. Based on previous experience, I am sure someone > relies on mhl _not_ doing any MIME parsing, but I can't accept that as > a reasonable default. Can you really imagine a new nmh user (okay, we > don't get many of those, but pretend that we do!) sitting down and coming > to the realization that to handle pretty much any modern email messages, > they have to configure something? That just sounds terrible, and I can't > really defend that behavior. That's why now mhshow will now do character > set conversion by default, as opposed to having to configure every single > character set you wanted to convert manually. > > Yeah, it may break something; I've written about the balancing act we > have between trying to maintain backwards compatibility and moving nmh > forward. I just don't think having out-of-the-box behavior that is simply > wrong when it comes to MIME messages is reasonable in this day and age. > But I'm willing to hear from opposing viewpoints; where we draw the line > between backwards compatibility and moving things forward (but possibly > breaking things for people) is something that needs to be decided on a > case-by-case basis. So I am interested in hearing what people think > about changes, and I believe that for every change that I knew would > break something for someone I did solicit feedback here. > > Unfortunately, the situation we're left with is that nmh really has it's > roots in MH, but unfortunately development stalled on MH at a crucial > time when MIME email was starting to take off. The code was reorganized > and mhn was split off into a bunch of utilities, but hard decisions > about what to do with MIME email never got made, and in the intervening > decades people developed their own workarounds to deal with the lousy > MIME support. This is what we're grappling with now. > > >Well you're right, I don't. And you are a smart-ass :-) I have thousands of > >packages installed on my system that get auto-updated daily. It would be a > >full time job to look at the release notes for every update. Not gonna > >happen. > >So in general I prefer packages that fix bugs and add features without > >breaking > >things because I'm trying to get other work done. > > But see, this kind of proves my point. Wouldn't it have been nice if repl > just started dealing with MIME email out of the box, rather than you having > to configure it? But a huge change like that would have broken something > for someone. > > --Ken
Well, in this specific case I guess that I could consider it a bug fix so it would be OK. _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
