what those of us who loved and used burst(1) in the RFC 934 era, and i
may be speaking for Norm here but i don't know, is that "f" "o" "r" "w"
"\n" at the shell prompt just does the right thing. telling me that i
have to pay attention to how the message i received was encoded toward
me so that i can use the appropriate command line option to ensure that
it is forwarded in its entirety as it would have been in the RFC 934 era
sounds like crazy talk.
Okay, I get your point. It's not that I even disagree with you; I'm
more explaining the reality of the situation. We're dealing with the
Original Sin of MH MIME support, in that it wasn't tackled in really
sensible way. I get the impression that back then people thought MIME
messages were going to be rare; obviously that's not what happened.
here's what i think you're forgetting. MH's user base is aging. we are
not attracting new 20-somethings. i am 53 now. old enough to learn new
tricks? maybe. i'm learning GoLang, for example. but am i going to
remember that "forw" works for RFC 934 format but that i have to invoke
it differently and also answer whatnow(1) differently if MIME is
involved? no. sorry, but no. brain cells die every day, and i have to
conserve the ones i have left for things which matter more to me than this.
I haven't forgotten; I was just saying that hey, TECHNICALLY, no new code
needs to be written.
i think what i'm suggesting is that forw needs a -auto option, which
ought to be made the default, which will detect that MIME was used
instead of RFC 934 on the message i'm forwarding, and DTRT ("do the
right thing") or perhaps even DWIM ("do what i mean").
I have to ask ... when was the last time you received a RFC 934 digest?
I'm not saying we should get rid of that support, but I am thinking that
maybe we shouldn't even be generating them unless the user specifically
asks for them. To implement an "auto" switch we'd have to decide
what you mean by a "MIME message"; if it's something that includes a
MIME-Version header, AFAICT that's pretty much all messages nowadays.
Here's what would be simple, given the reality of the code today.
Generate a "Forward:" header on the draft that contained which messages
to build into the outgoing message. Mhbuild would process those, like
it does for Attach: today. That would pretty much always work out of
the box. -mime would be come the default. If you wanted the older style
specify -rfc934. Or maybe -nomime. That amount of code would be small.
--Ken
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