> The reason I supply the extra two arguments is that NMH makes life >difficult for us here. The ideal situation would be that your formatproc >is invoked in exactly the same way as your showproc, so that if you have >a custom showproc that does things you like, you can directly reuse it. >Unfortunately, NMH invokes your formatproc with only the *body* of the >email you're replying to, without the headers (including without the >MIME headers that will tell you what the body means, which is why I have >to pass them as command line arguments).
Since I wrote that code, let me explain a bit; certainly it wasn't a goal of mine to intentionally screw over formatproc writers (note: I also wrote a formatproc). One of the original sins of MH, which was continued in nmh, was that it never really grappled with MIME properly. There are a lot of very rich features for dealing with message headers, but the general assumption was that body of the message was going to be plain text; despite what people might want to believe otherwise, this isn't a valid assumption and probably hasn't been for close to 20 years now. There was ONE basic MIME utility in MH (mhn) and that situation was slightly improved by splitting off mhn into a few separate utilities in nmh, but still there's a divide between the MIME and non-MIME aware parts of nmh, and there's nowhere this divide is more apparent when you try to reply to a MIME message. As an attempt to grapple with this, I decided to add options to mhl to allow the body to be passed to an external program (formatproc). But due to the structure of mhl it was very very difficult to pass the WHOLE message in, so we were limited to passing in just the body. If you think otherwise you should take a look at mhl sometime. Again, I don't think this situation is ideal, but given the limitations on available development resources I felt SOMETHING was better than nothing. In a perfect world, all nmh tools would be MIME-aware, and you could configure mhl to explain EXACTLY how you want to display a MIME message; this would just naturally remove all of the hacks surrounding repl and things would Just Work like they are supposed to. Really, in the original MH architecture show's job is to just SELECT messages to display, and mhl is supposed to do the heavy lifting on message display. But sadly, right now my available free time is basically zero. Sigh. Maybe one day ... --Ken _______________________________________________ Exmh-users mailing list Exmh-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/exmh-users
