Re: [Nmh-workers] Back to Dates

[David Levine]

Ken wrote:

> that suggests to me that we should write some well-commented
> examples and distribute them, so users can easily pick which
> one they should use

I agree completely.

> The thing that I wonder about is, not everyone might know to
> look in $(mhdir)/etc for those examples.  So a suggestion on
> where we should point users to our examples would be welcome.

For the mhical man page, I borrowed the FILES section of the
mhshow man page and listed the alternatives:

   .../etc/nmh/mhical.24hour  The default display template
   .../etc/nmh/mhical.12hour  Display template that uses 12-hour clock

Norm wrote:

# Given this, I don't much care what the default would be, but I would
# think for new users, "here" would be best.

install-mh(1) could ask the user what they want and encode the
selection in their profile.

# I suppose that all this could be done with mh-format, but then it
# would be beyond the ken of ordinary folks, and it would be harder to
# vary.

Would it be harder?  I think that you're asking for profile entry
choices like this:

timeformat: local
timeformat: message
timeformat: UTC

Are these any harder to use?

mhshow: -format mhl.localtime
mhshow: -format mhl.messagetime
mhshow: -format mhl.UTC

That does suffer from explosion if we provide all combinations of
all choices, but we clearly shouldn't do that.

And "vary" has different meanings.  The mh-format approach supports
date formats, for example, that we don't/won't support in the code.

David