Re: [Nmh-workers] why does mhfixmsg dislike long text lines?

[David Levine]

Steven wrote:

> This suggests to me that removing the 998-character limit in mhfixmsg
> (only, and nowhere else) is a reasonable thing to do.

I think that -decodetext binary would be a better approach, but note
that warning about producing non-compliant messages.  But maybe none of
this is necessary, see below re. -reformat.

> The comment in mhfixmsg which I quoted at the beginning of this thread
> seems to be saying that sometimes message components described as text/*
> are really binary files, and that the 998-character limit is used in
> mhfixmsg (only) as a heuristic to identify this situation.

I wouldn't call it a heuristic.  It's definitive, according to RFC 2045.

> (Digression:  I'd also prefer to reformat the long lines at the same time.
> I'm seriously considering piping the decoded HTML through something like
> tidy [ http://www.html-tidy.org/ ] before saving it. :-/)

mhfixmsg -reformat does that.  That's the default, but you overrode it
with -noreformat.

> As it happens, I have >
>    mhbuild:  -maxunencoded 900
>
> in my .mh_profile, and have had for a while.
>
> This is a coincidence, in that I was unaware of the 998-character limit,
> until today, but happily I'm under it anyway. :-)

Uh, that's a different issue.  -maxunencoded 900 can cause creation of
messages with lines that long, and they wouldn't comply with RFC 5322.
Going a little over 78 might not be of a problem in practice, but . . .

> ...so if I were to quote text with wider lines than that the right thing
> would happen

No guarantee of that.  I wouldn't consider 900 to be "a little over" 78.

> The only reason I've been writing to nmh-workers is that I'm unaware
> of anywhere else to turn.  Is there a corresponding nmh-users list or
> something similar?

No, nmh-workers is the place for all things nmh.

>     For example, I particularly depend on being able to find specific saved
>     messages using grep or mairix[**] -- and if the message body is saved in
>     base64 encoding, both of those programs fail completely.

That was the main motivation for creating mhfixmsg.

David