>As with my attach addition which is way more contentious now than it >was when I implemented it, my proposal on side is compatible with the >existing ui. It would look the same if you didn't turn on any of the >"new" options. Could even leave mhlist et. al. in place for any who >love 'em. It's true to the "don't break things" philosophy.
So, out of curiousity I went back and dug into these changes ... I see they were committed on August 19th, 2002. More than 11 years ago! The previous changes to that were all in July, and then a HUGE gap from those to March of 2001. That was also back during our transition from mhost to savannah ... and from the mailing list archives, it doesn't look like you sent out any email about the change either (correction: looks like there was a brief announcement on 2002-11-29). So ... I expect the reason that it wasn't controversial was that no one noticed (I actually didn't notice that support for years, I am sure). This gets into larger issues in terms of code changes, long term direction, etc etc. Since we've touched on these meta-issues, let me speak to them more directly. Over the years we've been slowly limping toward getting better MIME support, but it's mostly been via what can kindly be called "hacks". E.g., the attach support, replyfilter (and associated framework), and mhfixmsg. Most of this code went in with little discussion; well, there was some discussion about mhfixmsg, but I rammed in the framework for replyfilter through without any discussion (I think people were just happy to have some solution that they didn't care; the only serious discussion was where to put the replyfilter script). These stealth hacks are fine in and of themselves; they're driven by real needs, and more code is always welcome. But we're getting to the point where all of the easy stuff is done, and we're left with harder and harder things. Those things require us to really think about some of the larger issues that we need to grapple with. This is why I brought up the issues regarding always running mhbuild; I thought it was simple, but it turns out it ain't (like many things in nmh). That gets into the larger meta-issue of "How do we want people to compose MIME content, anyway?". We're a little bit closer to making that better now. I'm not always sure of the right answer; that's why I punt a lot of these things to the list. It also forces me to defend my ideas, and frequently fighting for them makes them better (I think my new idea for mhbuild/attach is better than the old one). I guess my point is that I think the time of stealth hacks, especially when it comes to MIME support, is over. We need to start thinking larger and long-term and grapple with serious issues that have been languishing for a few decades. To me that's the core of all of these discussions. I think we're working them out, it's just going to take a while. That's not to say that everything needs to go through the mailing list, or that we need to implement something like Gerrit; use your best judgement. I suspect like Mike O'Dell suggested a little while ago we're eventually going to have to have a MIME multiplexor at some point to really handle everything properly. How that will work or be implemented really is up in the air, though. --Ken _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers