Re: [nmh-workers] Need help with sending mail

[Ken Hornstein]

>Ken wrote:
>
>> Weeeelll .... the whole reason this started was because people aren't
>> reading the documentation :-)
>
>Documentation is not the whole reason.  The fact that post(8) behaves
>differently from nearly all other MH/nmh programs requires an exception
>when thinking about it.  (SUBTLE!)  That is validated by the fact that
>three of us looked at the user's profile excerpt and two missed the use
>of a post: profile component.  (And I was one of those two and am very
>well aware of this exception.)  And that the documentation itself had
>missed this until late 2011.
>
>Is there any reason that we should NOT provide a warning to help users?
>Especially first-time users who haven't read all 19K lines of man pages?
>Aren't we trying to minimize configuration impediments?

I've thought about this a bit.  Here's the best answer I can give.

If you have a profile entry under "post", it really isn't for the
program post(8); they're for a program who's argv[0] is "post".  I know
that seems like nitpicking, and maybe it is ... but I think it's an
important point; it's a commonly-used idiom to create a different set of
options to commands by symlinking your custom name to the original nmh
utility and putting the options under your custom name.

I'm fine with a warning for a misconfiguration, but ... given the way
the profile entries work, I'm not sure it IS a misconfiguration.  Now,
you're going to raise the entirely-reasonable point that "hey, 9 times
out of 10 it's not going to do anything when the user thinks it will,
and that is a misconfiguration."  I get where you're coming from.  It's
just ... we have a situation where a program that is NOT misconfigured
is warning about ANOTHER program that may or may not be misconfigured.
This is of course unavoidable if you want to generate a warning because
all nmh programs are independent of each other, and the program you
really want to generate a warning can't, because it doesn't read the
profile.

But ... if you're not convinced, how about a compromise?  send(1) is
the normal front-end to post(8); how about have it check and issue a
warning, rather than all programs?

--Ken