Re: [Nmh-workers] Future directions for nmh

[Jon Steinhart]

Paul Vixie writes:
> Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > ...
> > I think that we should keep the mail store as is.  I agree that the MIME
> > and character set stuff has made it less grep-able than it used to be,
> > but it's still useful.
> 
> useful for what? i have no remaining use cases of my own.

All of the email about which I care has ASCII subject lines.
Also, I often grep for a particular attachment name.
 
> > I am emboldened by David's posting regarding add-hook, etc.  Didn't know
> > that anybody actually used that stuff other than me.  The hook stuff was
> > an expedient hack on my part, and it's not really as robust as it could
> > be.  I would like to see it made more of an integral part of nmh as
> > opposed to the add-on hack that I did.
> 
> i love your hooks. used them in mhdb:
> 
> http://family.redbarn.org/~vixie/mhdb.shar

Glad to hear it.  Never got any feedback on 'em so it's cool to hear that
people are using them.
 
> > The reason that having a solid hooks implementation is important is that
> > it allows users to have whatever alternate mail stores suit them without
> > having to make them part of nmh.
> 
> my situation is the opposite. i'd like multiple mail store types inside 
> NMH, or a pluggable hooks-style interface allowing the creation of same, 
> so that i can use NMH command line tools to attack my Maildir store as 
> created for me by Dovecot.
> 
> a mail store that i can only reach by the command line isn't maximally 
> useful.
> 
> a mail store that i can't reach by the command line isn't maximally 
> useful, either.

I'm a bit confused here.  I use nmh because I can reach the command store
via the command line.  What other way is their to use it?  And other
programs can operate on the mail store, which is part of what makes it
great.

Are you saying that you'd like to see the nmh cli abstracted to the point
where it could work on different flavors of mail store?  If so, that seems
like a big change.  Sort of like the hooks, but with a DLL interface
instead of the shell?

Jon