Ken wrote:
Weeeelll .... the whole reason this started was because people aren't
reading the documentation :-)
Documentation is not the whole reason. The fact that post(8) behaves
differently from nearly all other MH/nmh programs requires an exception
when thinking about it. (SUBTLE!) That is validated by the fact that
three of us looked at the user's profile excerpt and two missed the use
of a post: profile component. (And I was one of those two and am very
well aware of this exception.) And that the documentation itself had
missed this until late 2011.
Is there any reason that we should NOT provide a warning to help users?
Especially first-time users who haven't read all 19K lines of man pages?
Aren't we trying to minimize configuration impediments?
I've thought about this a bit. Here's the best answer I can give.
If you have a profile entry under "post", it really isn't for the
program post(8); they're for a program who's argv[0] is "post". I know
that seems like nitpicking, and maybe it is ... but I think it's an
important point; it's a commonly-used idiom to create a different set of
options to commands by symlinking your custom name to the original nmh
utility and putting the options under your custom name.
I'm fine with a warning for a misconfiguration, but ... given the way
the profile entries work, I'm not sure it IS a misconfiguration. Now,
you're going to raise the entirely-reasonable point that "hey, 9 times
out of 10 it's not going to do anything when the user thinks it will,
and that is a misconfiguration." I get where you're coming from. It's
just ... we have a situation where a program that is NOT misconfigured
is warning about ANOTHER program that may or may not be misconfigured.
This is of course unavoidable if you want to generate a warning because
all nmh programs are independent of each other, and the program you
really want to generate a warning can't, because it doesn't read the
profile.
But ... if you're not convinced, how about a compromise? send(1) is
the normal front-end to post(8); how about have it check and issue a
warning, rather than all programs?
--Ken
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