Re: [Nmh-workers] New new/fn/fp/unseen program

[Peter Maydell]

Josh Bressers wrote:
>On 21 July 2008 at 16:55, Eric Gillespie wrote:
>> I've used Luke Mewburn's new (http://www.mewburn.net/luke/src/new)
>> 
>> for as long as I've used mh, and I've used this much faster
>> reimplementation in my local mh tree for the last couple years.
>> Since I'm trying to get back to using stock nmh, I'm hoping you
>> will accept it for inclusion.

>It would probably make sense to just give Eric CVS access.  Given how lazy
>we all are, it's silly to miss these patches.

I don't have any particular objection to giving more people CVS access,
but like Joel I'm not totally sure about whether this should be present.
(I have a script myself which says "list all the folders with unseen
messages", but we can't put every nmh user's scripts into the distribution;
so there has to be a strong consensus that it's filling a definite gap.)

In any case there are a few things that would need cleaning up for this
to go into CVS:

(1) are we happy that 'unseen', 'new', 'fp', 'fn' don't clash with any
other Unix commands? Probably OK, but if anybody has any complaints
about the names they need to be checked now. Perhaps it should be
'fprev' and 'fnext'?

(2) the new commands need man pages

(3) you're assuming the unseen-sequence's name is 'unseen' here:
      command = concat ("scan +", node->n_name, " unseen", NULL);

(4) you don't seem to handle the profile specifying multiple
unseen sequences

(5) your behaviour if no unseen-sequence is specified (assume it's
called "unseen") isn't the same as the rest of nmh, although I'm
not sure what it ought to do instead (fail with an error, maybe)

(6) I'm a bit dubious about the use of system() to run scan; it
feels to me like if you're a core part of nmh you should just
be able to call a function to do the scan output directly.

Also, where does the '.folders' file come from? I seem to have one,
but it only has a few of my folders listed in it...

[Technically that call to concat() ought to end in "(char*)NULL"
or "(char*)0" but none of the rest of nmh seems to get that bit
of C trivia right either :-)]

-- PMM