ken wrote:
Alright, I see where you're going with this. Fair enough; that's not
how I personally work with MIME messages, but enough people have said
that they want this (and Paul even wrote something that does it!) that
clearly this UI fills a need.
But ... let's take a step back. I've heard that "whatnow" is a Horrible
Corruption of the MH way, in that everything should be a distinct
command rather than create a shell that does a bunch of commands. I
find that argument compelling; any shell we create will lack the full
power of a command shell, and I'm assuming we don't want to cram all of
/bin/sh into nmh. So do you (and others) really want a "MIME shell",
or do you just want a bunch of commands to operate on MIME parts? I
in practice, for me, the shell approach hasn't been an issue. for the
parts of a message that are plain text, or close enough, i can see
them just fine with mhshow, and commandline tools mostly work. for
the non-text parts, the commandline tools don't really work well
anyway -- i'd argue that xv, xpdf or libreoffice, although they all
take a filename as argument, aren't really commandline tools. so
whatever new command we came up with would just invoke one of those
anyway. i just need something, while looking at a message, that will
invoke the right viewer/saver/whatever on a part, without corrupting
it.
i suppose if i wanted to someday go through all of the mail in a
folder and, say, extract all of the pdf attachments from a specific
sender, i'd appreciate a scriptable interface to mime parts, but my
needs so far are met by a per-message interactive process.
paul
do recognize that there is the issue of command collision, so that's
one concern. Technically, I see no obvious challenge in doing it as
individual commands; there would be some file in $(mhdir) that would
hold current part you're working on, like context today.
If the message parser is done right, mhl would just be a special case of
your "view" command. Or view would be mhl; details are still a bit
hazy.
--Ken
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=----------------------
paul fox, pgf(_at_)foxharp(_dot_)boston(_dot_)ma(_dot_)us (arlington, ma,
where it's 47.5 degrees)
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