Re: [Nmh-workers] Interesting weirdness

[Jon Steinhart]

Ken Hornstein writes:
> >Guess that I've used -form forever and it's never caused problems until
> >now.  I'll use -file from now on.  Thanks.
> 
> Ok, I guess I was wrong earlier when I said -form was part of 1.5.
> I had forgotten that it HAS been around forever.
> 
> When I added mh-format support to comp and others, those programs already
> had a -form switch; I repurposed it so it would be used as the switch
> for the mh-format template file (like repl did).
> 
> I guess my thinking was: "this is the switch for a template to compose a
> new message".  I never thought that people would be using it to restart
> a previously-composed message.  And I understand what you're saying about
> stopping at the end of the message headers, but there are two problems
> with that: the format module doesn't really know anything about a message
> syntax; it just sees the whole thing as a big string, and we've had people
> ask about creating custom signatures using format instructions (e.g., doing
> things with %(getenv).
> 
> I suspect this is more information than you wanted to know, but
> hope this explains exactly how we got here.
> 
> --Ken

No, the extra info is fine.  Thanks.

Jon