It seems to me as if you would be doing compatibility for
compatibility's sake. This is sticking to old cruft. Caring to much
for some old userbase likely keep you from getting new users while old
ones slowly vanish. This also includes frontends. It is a dead end.
I symphathize with your viewpoint, but if we are voting, I'd try to
come down on the side of compatibility if possible. Of course,
we can always argue about whether or not existing behavior is "right"
or even worth preserving; that's one of the things that has no right
or wrong answer, it's a constant balancing act that requires a judgement
call every time something new is proposed, and of course different
people have different judgement.
Is nmh just good enough for you and therefore better not changed? Is
updating your setups once a year more effort than the improvements of
modernization? It could be and I would understand. The point is:
Well, for me nmh isn't quite good enough right now; I wish it would do
some things better. And I'm not the only one:
http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/iwFt
The main reasons listed there? Lack of IMAP support and poor MIME
handling. Okay, on the first point there are diverging opinions, and
I can at least respect other viewpoints on how nmh should deal with
IMAP (or even if it should). But right now when it comes to MIME
we kinda fail for a lot of common use cases. I don't view this as being
due to a lot of difference of opinions on what we should do; I think
the real issue is that dealing with MIME is hard, given the age of the
codebase and the basic question of what you should do with things like
UTF-8 messages on a plain tty.
What is the goal of nmh?
That's what I don't understand. No matter what I try to do, I conflict
with you. This indicates that we probably have too different views of
nmh.
I guess my personal view is that nmh is a set of simple, modular Unix
tools for dealing with email, and the goal of nmh is to deal with those
messages (read, file, delete, reply) from the Unix command line
interface. Note that when I say "simple", I mean the user interface to
those tools is as simple as possible; the tools themselves can be
complicated.
With pleasure I see the discussion of nmh2 which could finally be a
step in my direction. But before I cheer too much up, I'd better know:
What's the goal for nmh2, if it should come to happen?
I think others will have to speak to that; I'm okay with nmh continuing
without having an nmh2.
--Ken
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