ken wrote: > Alright, I see where you're going with this. Fair enough; that's not > how I personally work with MIME messages, but enough people have said > that they want this (and Paul even wrote something that does it!) that > clearly this UI fills a need. > > But ... let's take a step back. I've heard that "whatnow" is a Horrible > Corruption of the MH way, in that everything should be a distinct > command rather than create a shell that does a bunch of commands. I > find that argument compelling; any shell we create will lack the full > power of a command shell, and I'm assuming we don't want to cram all of > /bin/sh into nmh. So do you (and others) really want a "MIME shell", > or do you just want a bunch of commands to operate on MIME parts? I
in practice, for me, the shell approach hasn't been an issue. for the parts of a message that are plain text, or close enough, i can see them just fine with mhshow, and commandline tools mostly work. for the non-text parts, the commandline tools don't really work well anyway -- i'd argue that xv, xpdf or libreoffice, although they all take a filename as argument, aren't really commandline tools. so whatever new command we came up with would just invoke one of those anyway. i just need something, while looking at a message, that will invoke the right viewer/saver/whatever on a part, without corrupting it. i suppose if i wanted to someday go through all of the mail in a folder and, say, extract all of the pdf attachments from a specific sender, i'd appreciate a scriptable interface to mime parts, but my needs so far are met by a per-message interactive process. paul > do recognize that there is the issue of command collision, so that's > one concern. Technically, I see no obvious challenge in doing it as > individual commands; there would be some file in $(mhdir) that would > hold current part you're working on, like context today. > > If the message parser is done right, mhl would just be a special case of > your "view" command. Or view would be mhl; details are still a bit > hazy. > > --Ken > > _______________________________________________ > Nmh-workers mailing list > Nmh-workers@nongnu.org > https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers =---------------------- paul fox, p...@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 47.5 degrees) _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
