Re: [Nmh-workers] Autoconf changes & new feature

[David Levine]

Ken Hornstein wrote:

> David Levine writes:
> >Should we move the current nmh project to maintenance-only
> >mode, and start up a separate nmh2?  It need not promise
> >perfect backward compatibility, I would think reason enough
> >to start anew.
> 
> Is it April 1st already? :-)
> 
> Were you thinking of writing a COMPLETELY NEW nmh from scratch?  Or
> just saying, "Okay, we're no longer guaranteeing bug-compatibility with
> nmh1; your scripts may break"?.
> 
> The latter doesn't sound bad to me (although I was actually thinking
> of making the new release be 2.0).

The latter.

Here's my thinking:  nmh is very difficult to modify without
breaking something.  Even your seemingly innocent autoconf
changed raised issues, including:

# (this one will break my personal build-from-cvs setup, for instance

It breaks my personal build, also.  I'm not complaining, it's
trivial for me to fix.  But hopefully there are many more users
out there who don't want to be bothered with ANY changes to the
software they use most often.

nmh has been stable for years.  Let's leave it that way.  To
avoid breaking anything, let's call it something else (nmh2
is my placeholder) from now on.  If someone wants to add C++
code or python scripts to it, fine with me.  If that
replaces some C code, great.

If someones want to rewrite nmh from scratch in python or
whatever, I agree with you:  more power to them.  But I
don't see that happening.  Given the history of mh/nmh, I
expect that progress will be more likely if we evolve.

It's also an opportune time to move the code base into git
or whatever.

David

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