Re: [Nmh-workers] sortm's Default of all is Brain-Damaged.

[Paul Fox]

ken wrote:
 > >Once again I've been bitten by a lone `sortm' defaulting to `all' when I
 > >intended to do `sortm lp'.  On a folder of some 20,000 emails that quite
 > >perturbs incremental backups!  `rmm' doesn't default to `all' so I'm not
 > >sure sortm should;  it's too destructive as the old order may not be
 > >reproducible.
 > 
 > Hm.  I guess to me "sortm" defaulting to "all" makes sense; I mean,
 > don't you want to that the vast majority of the time?  (I'm guessing
 > "lp" is a sequence you created?).  And I guess I always figured the
 > order of messages was ephemeral; that's why sortm exists, after
 > all.
 > 
 > But I can't claim to be the arbiter of how people use nmh; what do others
 > think?

i almost never sort an entire folder -- usually i just sort the unseen
sequence, or some other small batch of messages.

rather than changing the default behavior by default, how about adding
an option to change the default behavior.  :-)
    sortm -noall
would error out if no other args are given.  clearly this would be most
useful as profile entry.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 52.0 degrees)