Re: [Nmh-workers] Starting the final call for features for 1.7

[David Levine]

Laura wrote:

> I think this may be an advantage of living in a part of the world
> where ASCII is too small.

I don't know much about utf-7, but a quick look around shows that it
reduces the need for base64 or quoted-printable encoding.

> mhshow-show-text/plain: \
> iconv -f "$(charset=$(echo %a | sed -n -r 's/.*charset="
> ?([-a-zA-Z0-9_]*).*/\1/p');
> if [ x$charset = xunicode-1-1-utf-7 ]; then echo utf-7;
> else echo ${charset:-iso-8859-1}; fi)" | less

I don't think you need that with nmh 1.6, and you shouldn't with 1.7,
assuming your locale (LANG, LC_ALL, or LC_CTYPE environment variable)
is set to a utf-7 or utf-8 (preferred by some) locale.

> I forgot about quoted printable -- I do get those, but very, very, very
> rarely.  I never figured out what quoted printable is for.

Like base64, it's another way of encoding 8-bit content so that it
can be sent and handled by 7-bit mail systems.

> The problem is that you typically get your new nmh one day when you, or
> maybe the sysadmins at work, do a system-wide update.  Since you never
> asked for it to get changed, you never noticed that you have a new
> version (unless things stop working for some reason). I am not sure what
> the best way to handle this is,

Build your own nmh?  If you want to give that a quick try:

    $ git clone git://git.savannah.nongnu.org/nmh.git
    $ cd nmh
    $ docs/contrib/build_nmh -div

though it assumes you have various packages installed, as noted in the
MACHINES file.  Those prerequisites are reduced if you build from the
distribution, but then you wouldn't get the bleeding edge.

> But can I make interleaved comments just as I did on this piece of mail
> in some mail that I am forwarding to others?

Not with dist, but you can with forw(1).

David