Hi [2020-03-21 09:54] markus schnalke <mei...@marmaro.de> > [2019-12-15 17:55] Philipp Takacs <phil...@bureaucracy.de> > > > > During that I found the Previous-Sequence again. I don't see a reason > > why we need this feature. The usecases, I see, for the feature are better > > handled with mark or the backlog of your shell. But I don't use this > > feature.
During reading some old mails on the nmh mailing list I found a use case. Put mails in a sequence after a refile[0]. Not sure if this works, but for this I would suggest to add a -preserve switch to refile instead of using previous-sequence for this, like nmh has done. > Just for reference, the section from mh-sequence(7): > > The Previous Sequence > Mmh provides the ability to remember the `msgs' or `msg' > argument last given to an mmh command. The entry `Previ‐ > ous-Sequence' should be defined in the mmh profile; its > value should be a sequence name or multiple sequence > names separated by spaces. If this entry is defined, > when an mmh command finishes, it will define the > sequence(s) named in the value of this entry to be those > messages that were specified to the command. Hence, a > profile entry of > > Previous-Sequence: pseq > > directs any mmh command that accepts a `msg' or `msgs' > argument to define the sequence `pseq' as those messages > when it finishes. > > Note: there can be a performance penalty in using the > `Previous-Sequence' facility. If it is used, all mmh > programs have to write the sequence information to the > .mh_sequences file for the folder each time they run. If > the `Previous-Sequence' profile entry is not included, > only pick and mark will write to the .mh_sequences file. Actually the last sentence is wrong. A lot more mmh programs write the .mh_sequences file, like show, inc, ... > Besides: It does introduce a lot of write accesses to the sequence > files. Would it only be the write access itself, it wouldn't be that bad. You still need to enable it. > Before we remove it, I just would like to know why it was > introduced in MH the first time and what possible other usecases > there could be. This means asking on the nmh-workers mailing list. > Both, out of curiosity and as a double-check in case we've not > thought on something. Do you wanna write this message or should > I? This is a good idea. I want to write this mail. So conclusion ask the nmh guys for use cases we missed and if there aren't any, remove it. Philipp [0] https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2005-12/msg00086.html
