In my humble opinion, mhshow already has too many switches and does too many
things. In my fantasy, the new version of mhshow (call it 'see' ?) would
normally take as its stdin the stdout of the new version of mhl (call it
'mhmime' ?). That is, mhmime would be responsible for understanding a message,
and see would be responsible for displaying the message to a user. So the
switches to mhmime would control how the message was interpreted and the
switches to see would control how the message was displayed.
Well, my view was that the relationship between show and mhl is kind of like
send and post; send has a lot of switches, but most of them are passed down
to post. send takes care of picking the message, doing some MIME processing
if necessary, but the actual message submission gets done by post.
Also, some practical concerns arise:
- As we've seen in repeated examples, people don't read the documentation
about new commands or features. So if new commands are required to handle
MIME messages (and nowadays, that's pretty much all of them) then they
will get little use and people will continue to think our MIME support
is lousy. I think our experience with show in 1.6 has shown we can do
better with the existing interface.
- I'm unclear about what exactly these new mhmime and see commands are
going to do, exactly. Right now 'show' handles things at the folder
level; you give it a folder, message numbers, sequence names, and it
handles folder level tasks like interpreting sequence names, removing
messages from the unseen sequence, etc etc. mhl takes filenames
from show and interpets them and displays them. My proposal is really
about making mhl smarter.
But I don't know what 'mhmime' is supposed to output; the interpreted
MIME contents of the message? Would that be some more structured content
of the message? Just the text parts, like mhshow does now by default?
What would this 'see' command exactly be doing?
--Ken
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