Making EXMH work with NMH is alarmingly simple. Add this to your
.exmh-defaults:
*Mops.reply.m.c_replyall: Msg_Reply -group
That doesn't fix exmh. To fix exmh you need a patch to exmh.
Fixing one user is not a solution.
This doesn't strike me as being particularly burdensome for the EXMH user to
do. It also doesn't strike me as being particularly burdensome for EXMH to
have a switch at install time for the user to specify whether NMH or MH is
being used under the hood, thus allowing EXMH to default correctly.
Um, except that fairly recent versions of nmh behave the same as MH in
this regard.
This is precisely the reason why I asked "is there a way for the exmh
install process to determine the correct group reply flags for repl".
Apparently there is not. The change is not even documented right
in the man page. The old broken -cc flag is still listed.
exmh has to maintain compatibility not only with MH, but with the "old"
nmh and now the current nmh. I presume xmh has similar issues.
MH was moribund before Richard began revamping it as NMH. Anyone who insists
that Richard should adhere strictly to MH's ancient ways is simply asking for
a return to that period of moribundity, which IMO benefits no-one.
The main reason people use nmh is that it's a supported version of MH.
Now nmh is no longer a supported version of MH. It's a supported version
of nmh -- its own thing.
I'm not saying nmh can't evolve. However the huge issue looming over MH
is that it's an extremely old package (relatively), with lots of history.
If it's going to evolve then there has be ways to maintain backwards
compatibility. Otherwise we're abandoning MH/nmh's huge installed base.
I see the reason now why lots of Linux distributions still ship with
the original MH -- compatibility. nmh is close, but not compatible.
Personally, given the choice of having an nmh which was feature-static and
stable versus incrementally-improving-but-incompatible, I'd pick the former.
I don't look for lots of features in nmh -- I use it primarily within exmh
(though I do have a significant number of scripts and other stuff built
around MH/nmh which I use outside exmh.).
People stick with MH (the system, not the program) because it does stay the
same. If nmh is going to evolve away from MH then a large fraction will
stop using nmh (at least nmh past the incompatibility change) or move on
to something else (like IMAP).
I am thankful for Richard for taking over nmh. I don't want him to stop
working on nmh. I just think nmh is going in the wrong direction.
--Dave