Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh in near, medium, and far-term

[David Levine]

Ralph wrote:

> Thoughts I've had over the years...  MH was handy because it integrated
> with the Unix command line and filesystem;  I still awk, etc.,
> ~/mail/inbox/* on occasion when nmh's commands don't suffice.  That's
> good;  I don't think nmh should grow every bell and whistle.
> 
> MIME breaks this.  If all textual parts were stored in UTF-8 on disk
> things would improve once again.

I agree.  Grep is a requirement for me.  I handle repl of
MIME messages by decoding base64-encoded text/plain parts.
I actually modify the message (using a script).  I realize
that not everyone wants to do that, but one of the beauties
of nmh is that I can.  So I am wary of fundamental changes
to nmh's message per file approach.  Additional files and/or
dbs with metadata would be fine.

It would be even better to integrate that decoding into nmh,
optionally of course, and I would like to do that some day.

I'm also wary of changing the message file naming scheme.
anno modifies messages, so it is inconsistent with a naming
scheme that includes file size, hash, or other properties.
I could probably live without anno, but someone else might
consider it important.

David