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

[Ken Hornstein]

>> I have mail stored on an IMAP server.  I think it's perfectly
>> reasonable that I should be able to do "scan +IMAP:inbox" (or however
>> you want to indicate that a particular folder is on an IMAP server; I
>
>Why not extend that to +mbox:inbox for mbox folders?

If someone wanted to do that, more power to them.

>Seriously, though, perhaps you could consider extending msh to support
>IMAP. At least in msh, users don't expect their scripts to work.

I'd personally be happy with msh supporting IMAP.  That would solve my
problem.

>I don't contend that this wouldn't have it's uses but I would argue that
>a user-space filesystem would be far more useful.

I have two technical concerns with a user-space filesystem.  One is
that right now it's rather unportable.  The second is that if you want
to use something like Kerberos (or anything that involves accessing
credentials from a user's context) it is technically challenging to
make the user's credentials available to the process performing the IMAP
access.  Both of those are solvable problems, but they're a lot of work.

>And, like Robert, I have many scripts used in conjunction with MH.
>Without similar IMAP support in these, MH doing IMAP would be of limited
>use to me.

But given that MH doesn't support IMAP now, it's not exactly a functionality
loss, is it?  But to be fair ... if your scripts used mhpath, then I think
it would be relatively easy to do the right magic to make them work.

Anyway, I've said my peace.

--Ken