Re: [Nmh-workers] Should attachment header handling be in send?

[Jon Steinhart]

Oliver wrote:
> Jon Steinhart wrote:
> 
> > I feel the same way about having the attachment header containing full
> > mhbuild directives.  Not sure what you get from that; if you want to
> > do mhbuild directives, do 'em in the body, it still works.  The whole idea
> 
> The attach command is convenient though. Perhaps if the -attach option
> is not set in .mh_profile, attach could add an mhbuild directive to the
> body.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.  Are you suggesting that if some option
is not set in the profile, then the whatnow attach command run mhbuild?
Wouldn't that be the same as running the whatnow mime command?

Oliver wrote:
> Jon Steinhart wrote:
> 
> > enough, what I'm suggesting is that
> >     
> >     forw 123
> > 
> > when the folder is my inbox make a message that begins with
> > 
> >     X-MH-Attachment: /home/Mail/jon/inbox/123
> 
> Using the same mechanism for mime forwards just reinforces the idea of
> using mhbuild directives in the header: this could be a #forw directive.
> I don't really like the idea of it attempting to guess if the file is a
> message because it would sometimes get it wrong.
> 
> It wouldn't be hard to be backward compatible with X-MH-Attachment that
> contain just a filename. I also can't see that it is making the
> attachment stuff any harder to use. It is merely providing a little more
> control for someone that wants it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "backward compatible" here.  I don't want
the whatnow attach command to start having special characters; that puts
us right back where we were having to know what to escape when using
mhbuild.

How 'bout this?  Why not add another option similar to the -attach
option that I added to whatnow and send?  Why not add a -forward
option that would specify the name of another header that would be used
for forwarding messages.  So, for example, if you had in your profile

        repl:           -forward X-MH-Forward
        forw:           -forward X-MH-Forward
        send:           -attach X-MH-Attachment -forward X-MH-Forward
        whatnow:        -attach X-MH-Attachment

then if you were reading message inbox/10 and did a repl -mime it would
add the header

        X-MH-Forward:           inbox/10

to your message.  Then, if you did an "attach foo" at whanow it would
add the header

        X-MH-Attachment:        foo

and send would know how to process both of them.  The difference between
X-MH-Forward and X-MH-Attachment would be that send would know that the
content-type for a X-MH-Forward is 822.

My goal in all of this is to have it be simple and automatic from a user's
perspective.

Jon