[Nmh-workers] suppressing display methods

[Paul Fox]

i've long thought that it wasn't possible for a user's local
configuration to "mask out" a display method configured in
/etc/mhn.defaults.  it turns out that this isn't true, but i can't
find any mention of the mechanism in the docs.  (my particular desire
has always been to locally disable the rendering of text/html parts,
to force display of the plain parts.)

so i'd like to apply this (or a similar) patch to all of the
appropriate man pages (i.e., mhbuild, mhshow, mhstore, mhn, mhfixmsg),
but obviously only if people think the behavior is intentional.

thoughts?  am i the last MH user to realize this is possible?

paul

diff --git a/man/mhshow.man b/man/mhshow.man
index abfcc22..e06892b 100644
--- a/man/mhshow.man
+++ b/man/mhshow.man
@@ -241,6 +241,13 @@ The result will be executed under
 \*(lq/bin/sh\*(rq, with the standard input
 set to the content.
 .PP
+If a display string is empty (i.e., the entry exists, but its value
+consists of nothing more than whitespace) then it will be treated as
+if it didn't exist at all, except that such entries found via a user's
+profile or MHSHOW environment variable will cause non-empty entries
+found in the system-installed profile (%etcdir%/mhn.defaults) to be
+ignored.
+.PP
 The display string may contain the following escapes:
 .PP
 .RS 5


----------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 45.0 degrees)