Re: [Nmh-workers] Understanding nmh (aka. What's the goal)

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX)]

> It seems to me as if you would be doing compatibility for
> compatibility's sake. This is sticking to old cruft. Caring to much
> for some old userbase likely keep you from getting new users while old
> ones slowly vanish.

Why do we need new users?  When did this become a popularity contest?

MH was written by and for people who have a deep understanding of how email
works, and who want to exploit the capabilities of email to the n-th degree.
These people also tend to be pretty hard core about the fundamentals of
software engineering, one of which is avoiding change for changes sake.

And MH, by its very intent, is a highly flexible tool.  When you understand
the value of its tool-based approach to handling mail, you'll realize that
most of the functionality you want you can add yourself by writing shell
scripts around the existing commands; there no need to add everyone's
pet functionality into the core.

Which isn't to say things don't need to be changed.  But the die-hard MH
user community has been using this software for over two decades, and most
of us are unimpressed by the Linux way of doing 'software development.'

--lyndon