Ken Hornstein <[email protected]> writes: >>I don't recall when attachments first came into nmh, if I ever knew. But I >>don't understand why the feature I talked about was not added to forw at that >>time. Maybe it was because, for some reason I don't understand it is >>difficult?? > >Weeellll ... it depends what you mean by "attachments". > >The more modern 'attach' support is actually relatively recent. A form >of it has been around in nmh for a while, but it really got standardized >for 1.5 and improved for 1.6. In terms of display, we started to SLOWLY >know about "attachments" and handling them better in terms of display >only for 1.6. > >In MH proper, historically it could handle headers ('components' in >MH-speak) very well. But the body of a message was treated as a single >text blob. ONE command existed called mhn which could handle MIME >messages; it displayed, listed, and composed them. Everything else >was MIME-ignorant. This is when forw -mime was created; it created a >mhn directive that it could use to compose the forwarded message. > >Along came nmh; mhn was split off into other utilities like mhshow, >mhlist, mhbuild, and mhstore (this initial work was done by Richard >Coleman). This was a slight improvement. But still, these are mostly >the only utilities that can really parse a MIME message properly. If >you're not using one of those utilities then your nmh command doesn't >really know about MIME (there are a few exceptions for things like RFC >2047 encoding). > >So, forw doesn't do what you expect it to do, because it never really >knew about MIME. That's the fault of whomever wrote mhn; was that >John Levine? I mean, I can't really fault him (or whomever it was) >TOO much; as we're discovering, it's a huge job. Everything is going >to need to be rototilled completely, new APIs are going to need to >be designed ... ugh. We're going to have to grapple with a lot of >changes. My eventual hope is that the internal interface to a message >automatically will do MIME parsing and then all commands will do >MIME parsing natively (see my "new MIME architecture" email for >details). This would, for example, let 'pick' search through >encoded text message bodies. Here are my thoughts on that regard: > >http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2014-07/msg00058.html >http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2014-07/msg00185.html > >I hope this clears things up a bit. The short answer is: Unless you're >using mhlist, mhstore, mhshow or mhbuild, your nmh command doesn't know >about MIME.
Yes, it clears things up quite lot. Thank you very much. I now understand. _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
