Re: [Nmh-workers] Question about anno

[Joel Reicher]

> Some years ago as part of the new attachment handling stuff, I added a
> -delete option to anno that allows header fields to be deleted from
> messages.  Today I was using anno with this option to delete some
> headers from messages and ran across something that I had never thought
> about when doing the initial implementation.  anno -delete only deletes
> the first matching header field.  So, if there is more than one header
> field with the same field name, only the first gets deleted.  This was
> not what I wanted today!
> 
> So, the question is, which of the following options do you like best or
> hate least?
> 
>  1.  Add a -all dash option to anno that says to delete all matching
>      headers, or
> 
>  2.  Just make anno -delete remove all matching headers.

I say delete them all. Using -delete without -all on a multivalued anno
key requires knowing which value happens to be listed first, and the
user is not likely to know this off the top of their head. To me, it
makes sense that -delete removes the key (and all associated values),
especially since -text can be optionally used to pick out a value.

There is a third possibility, though. The deletion can warn, abort, prompt,
etc. on encountering a multivalued annotation. Or perhaps add a -i
equivalent option.

Cheers,

        - Joel