Re: [Nmh-workers] Applying alias file , to Reply-To: and From: components of a draft

[Ken Hornstein]

>More seriously, how often do you have occasion to look at the sources,
>in your own use of of nmh or in answering queries. In my humble
>opinion, in each such instance you might want to consider modifying
>the documentation, or, at least, somehow flag, the need to modify the
>documentation.

Sigh.  I understand your point ... although my motivations for looking at
the source are perhaps not obvious.

The documentation could be clearer, there's no doubt.  But it IS
briefly alluded to in mh-alias(5).  Should we provide the exact,
specific details on the headers post uses for processing in mh-alias(5)?
Probably not.  Should that go in post(8)?  Maybe.  But it seems like a
lot of text to write for a relatively obscure question ... especially one
you could resolve with some brief experimentation.

But another reason I go to the source code very quickly is because we're
going to be doing some significant changes to nmh regarding MIME, hopefully
for the next release, and it's helpful to know as much about the nmh
internals as possible for a whole bunch of reasons ... like, trying to
get inside the heads of the original MH developers and keeping as much
of the core MH concepts as possible.

>But "Reply-To" has an HADR, below.  It is not all obvious, that post
>needs to look at that field. In fact, I would have guessed that it was
>ignored on the sending side.

Well, sometimes it's hard to get inside of the heads of those MH
developers ... except for you, Norm, the rest of them aren't really
around in the MH world anymore.  So I'm not sure what they were thinking.
My best guess is that they wanted the address header formatting (post
writes out each address individually and preserves indentation, presumably
to make it look nice) for all headers that contain email addresses.

Other headers have special cases; Subject, for instance, is preserved
so the subject header can be sent for Bcc's.

--Ken