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Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a c
From: |
Lyndon Nerenberg |
Subject: |
Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user |
Date: |
Mon, 17 Nov 2014 14:19:44 -0800 |
On Nov 17, 2014, at 1:38 PM, Paul Vixie <address@hidden> wrote:
> well, it does. with mime and calendaring and push, email is not a lonely
> application any more. to the extent that MH can't play in that world, it
> loses relevance. (i was an MH hardliner for 22 years, but these days i only
> use MH when searching my older archives, and this is the reason.)
>
> if we'd like MH to become relevant and remain relevant, it has to become a
> reasonable bearer channel for the apps that our families without shells or
> terminals can use to exchange data with us.
And that means it needs to become a very efficient and flexible dispatcher (and
inhaler) of MIME content.
I'm going to keep harping on about Plan 9, but the plumber[1] is a very good
example of one way to abstract the specifics of content from the applications
that are passing that content through. Acme, as an editor, has no knowledge of
anything other than files containing newline delimited lines of text. But when
combined with the plumber, it can display Postscript and PDF documents, compile
C programs, offer up ical invites, ... even provide a relaxing session with
eliza after a long hard day displaying nmh mailing list traffic.
Building in anything more than text display and input breaks the fundamental
contract upon which MH was built:
Text comes in, text goes out.
What modern MH is missing is a powerful enough interface to allow MH users to
devour that MIME content in a useful manner. That means a much more powerful
API between MH's internal MIME processing and the outside world.
Plan 9's upasfs has shown one way, but that won't work for UNIX. But I do
think there are ideas to be taken from Plan 9's plumbing interface; the content
dispatch model is very powerful. We do that to an extent now, with some very
tortured config file directives. Breaking the MIME content dispatch out and
giving it its own configuration language would make this a lot easier.
The primary motivation for creating the 'lmh' development branch was to bring
lua into the content dispatch arena. All summer and fall we have been moaning
about how we can't get the fine-grained control over the content display we
need. And the recent ical conversation nails the spike into any idea of a
generic solution. It's not the plumber, but it might be one way out.
As this week's conversation shows, static dispatch for things like ical objects
just doesn't – always – work. Sometimes it can, sometimes not. The failing
the current nmh-vs-ical debate points out is that nmh can't dispatch based on
dynamic MIME content. The lmh branch of the code is trying to play with this
...
[1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/plumb.pdf
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- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Doug Wellington, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Ken Hornstein, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Lyndon Nerenberg, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Ken Hornstein, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Lyndon Nerenberg, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Paul Vixie, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Ken Hornstein, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Paul Vixie, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Ken Hornstein, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user,
Lyndon Nerenberg <=
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Ken Hornstein, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Joel Uckelman, 2014/11/19
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, David Levine, 2014/11/19
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Joel Uckelman, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Ken Hornstein, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Joel Uckelman, 2014/11/17
- Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Paul Vixie, 2014/11/17
Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user, Christian Neukirchen, 2014/11/23