Re: [Nmh-workers] whatnow: can't attach because no header field name was given.

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <address@hidden>, 
Jon Steinhart <address@hidden> wrote:

>address@hidden writes:
>> --==_Exmh_1331860781_2149P
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>> 
>> On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:02:48 PDT, Jon Steinhart said:
>> 
>> > And yes, having defaults for common content types in the profile would
>> > be a good thing.  At the time that I wrote this stuff suffixes were not
>> > nearly as standardized as they are today.
>> 
>> Wow.  Maybe somebody should gather them all up into a file and call
>> it /etc/mime.types or something, so all programs could benefit?
>> 
>> </snark>
>
>Whoa, sarcasm.  It's SOOOOOO appreciated :)
>
>This all goes back to the "don't break things" approach that I took when I
>wrote this originally.  Maybe it's time to revisit it.  It's a complex issue
>because of the linkage between mime types and helper applications.  I used
>what was there which comes from mhshow.  No real objection to changing it
>althout /etc/mime.types may not exist on all systems.  Also, there are
>probably considerable differences in choices of helper applications.


Please excuse me if this is old news... I myself didn't know about it
until today... but it would seem that the file(1) command on both FreeBSD
and Linux implements a -i option that nicely spits out an appropriate
MIME type for the file being examined.

I haven't looked to see if the attach command for whatnow is using that
or not, but certainly, if it is (or if it will, in the future), then it
would seem to me that whatnow itself would not even need to make use of
any file called "mime.types" (no matter where located).

(Just tryin' to be helpful... on the off chance that I am not the only one
on this planet who didn't know already know about this -i option.)


Regards,
rfg