On Jun 16 at 10:07, Brendan Cully wrote: > On Saturday, 16 June 2007 at 12:46, Mike Hunter wrote: > > > > What do people think about allowing the user to specify in their muttrc > > what values do and do not constitute a fatal error coming from their > > editor? It seems to me mutt *should* react if it is told there's been a > > fatal editor failure, and given that the standard means of communicating > > such an error has occurred is inherently broken, we should allow for > > another means. > > I don't think having some editor_error_code configuration list is > substantially easier for users than > > #!/bin/sh > vim "$@"; true > > The script approach, on the other hand, is a lot simpler for mutt.
As has been expressed by D. Martin (I went to high school with a kid named Derek Martin, you aren't the same Derek Martin who throw crab apples at passing 18 wheelers on I-44, are you?), even if you refine this approach to allow for some exit codes to signify failure and some to signify success, it still means that a user has to author a script in a language present on a given machine to safely use an external editor on many systems. I could dash this out in perl very quickly, but I (a supposed developer!) don't know/remember csh (for example) and not all systems have perl (FBSD, not to mention windows!), so I think the expectations are actually broader than they first appear. While I don't expect mutt to be as "easy to use" as a mainstream gui mailer, I do think it should be a shared goal to have it be a "drop-in" (or at least `configure && make && make install` :) ) tool on common platforms. And since it *requires* the use of external tools to function (again as expressed in this thread) we should expect it to interface with those required tools in a sane way. One could argue that solaris ex is inherently insane, which is true, but if we demand users employ external editors with varying exit semantics (including "insanity" semantics :) ), we should have a mechanism for translation. My one concern is that I can't seem to find any documentation that ANY common editor actually endorses a return value that signifies a fatal error...but maybe we should encourage them :) Mike -- Mike Hunter Confessed subject-line misspeller, author of "The Subject Spellcheck Patch" http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=117268263816741&w=2
