Re: [Nmh-workers] whatnow(1)'s cd Doesn't Affect it's mime.

[Jon Steinhart]

Ralph Corderoy writes:
> Hi Jon,
> 
> > I do think that your example above is sort of bogus; whatnow does not
> > provide full shell functionality so you can't do things like that
> > anyway.
> 
> It's not bogus as it happened to me in normal use, that's how I found
> the problem.  whatnow isn't a full shell, but that doesn't matter.
> Neither are text editors, debuggers, FTP clients, `gawk -l filefuncs',
> etc.  All of these can offer `cd' and not have whatnow's bug.
> 
> > If I do "more foo" and "!cd bar" and then quit "more" I'm not in "bar"
> 
> Correct.  And more(1) was never in bar.  This starts a subshell and that
> changes directory and then exits.  more(1) doesn't have a built-in `cd'
> so it's not relevant here.
> 
> I don't think you've understood the problem I'm complaining about.  :-)
> It has nothing to do with whatnow not affecting the parent shell, during
> or after exit.
> 
> whatnow offers two commands, `ls' and `mime'.  Both are available at the
> same prompt.  `cd' affects `ls' and not `mime'.  Normal Unix programs
> that offer a built-in `cd' don't have it affect only some of the
> subsequent commands.  That's because they implement `cd' with chdir(2).
> whatnow doesn't, and this pretence is imperfect so bites the user.

Well, the whole purpose of adding the attachment stuff was to get rid of
mime.  I guess that I didn't understand your use case because it's not a
case that I ever considered and didn't design for.  If I understand you
correctly, attach works because I stick in the absolute path of the
attachments, and mime doesn't because it doesn't.  Again, not a use case
that I care about, if you do you know where the source code lives.  I
have *never* used composition file stuff in the years since I added the
attachment code.

So to be clear, I only added cd to make it easier for people to use attach.

Jon