Re: [bug-mailutils] mh strange behaviour

[Pierre-Jean]

Hello Sergey,

Sergey Poznyakoff writes:

> FWIW, that conforms with the behaviour of nmh whatnow utility.  However,
> I agree that it can be a useful feature, so I pushed the fix.  Please pull.
> Notice also that, albeit convenient, this functionality introduces a
> certain ambiguity to the semantics of *-next entries in the profile.

Instead of putting my editor's options in mh_profile, I tried to use a
shell alias containing the said options, and whatnow was still unable
to launch the editor. Even if that's not the historical behaviour,
accepting options seems to reflect the usual shell ergonomy.

> The first "edit" command will invoke "vi -i", and all the subsequent
> ones will invoke vi without additional options.  That's OK.  But what
> if I want to provide a -next entry for the invocation of vi without
> arguments?  There's no way of doing that, because the * in *-next is
> replaced by the command name only.  I could implement (as extension)
> somthing like "vi--i-next" to handle this case, but I haven't made my
> mind yet.  Opinions?

Concerning the *-next semantic, the default behaviour to consider the
command name *only* is my favourite one. The "vi--i-next" kind of
semantic seems error prone, and I believe very few people will want to
use the *-next capability to call the same editor with different
options. If that is really needed by some users, they probably could
use some shell aliases instead.

All that being said, I don't think my opinion has much value about MH:
For the short story, I was looking for a maintained "mail" command,
discovered mailutils, and found here an occasion to give mh a try.

Kind regards,
Pierre-Jean.