Re: [Nmh-workers] What is MH ? (was: exciting new stuff for 2.0 (IMAP proposal))

[Jon Steinhart]

Seems like a lot of energy going into nonproductive arguing here.
A few thoughts, in no particular order.

I want to keep using the mailing list; wiki's are nice for some
things, but not ongoing discussions.  I hate having to reread all
sorts of stuff in wikis to find the new stuff, and I like a linear
history of things.

I think that some work needs to be done on cleanup before any major
changes are made.  In particular, the library stuff needs to be
scrubbed, and I notice that Josh is doing some of that.  I think that
this is important so that the foundation doesn't keep shifting as
new stuff is built on top.  I hope to find some time to do some work
there soon.  (Any opinions on using mmap?  Would make all of the header
processing much simpler to just mmap the first few k of each message
and then run pointers through it.)

I use mh because it's one of the few things left that still pretty
much follows the unix philosophy that I learned as a teenaged summer
student at BTL in the early 70's.  I like having a set of commands
that each do one thing so it's easy to add new commands that do new
things.  I like the one-message-per-file structure which makes it
easy to apply the rest of the unix toolset to mail.

I would like any major changes to mh to follow the original non-monolithic,
one message per file philosophy.  I'd like to avoid changing mh into
something as complex as most of the monolithic packages that are out
there today.

In general, I don't see much point to the currently discussion which
seems to be escalating towards a flame war.  If you want to do something,
lay out a proposal, let's toss it around, and then get to work.

        Jon