Re: [nmh-workers] Formatting HTML to Text: netrik.

[Conrad Hughes]

Ken> As for repl(1), we've shipped with replyfilter in $(DOCDIR)/contrib
Ken> since 1.5 (released in 2012), and I use it on every message.

Just to say thanks for your patience on this: has been bugging me for a
while, and finally just sitting down and unpacking replfilter made a
huge difference.  Two minor issues cropped up for me while setting it up
though; these may already have been addressed (I use Debian, so am on
nmh 1.6-16), but just in case:

  - replfilter depends on 'par', which users may not have installed, but
    the failure mode in its absence is suboptimal: the quoted text is
    absent, and the error shown on the command line is something like

      Pipe reader process exited with 72057594037927935

    .. could well be enough just to list the required support tools in
    the instructions at the start of replfilter.

  - Reading the manpage I see that .mh_profile comments are supposed to
    start '#:', but lines starting '#' give every practical appearance
    of working as comments too — I've <ahem> wrongly used that for years
    — except that if you have two of them in a row, nmh commands fail
    with "no blank lines are permitted in .mh_profile".  The error at
    least seems confused.  Is the colon in '#:' just for easy parsing?
    Would it break things for # to introduce a comment?

Finally, I'd almost be inclined to have nmh-without-replfilter display a
message about replfilter, for example maybe in whatnowproc, so after
grinding your teeth about the undecoded base64 you at least see a
message suggesting a remedy for this after exiting the editor.  I
realise though that accurate detection of circumstances where it would
be helpful to display such a message might not easy, but it would save a
certain amount of repetition.

Conrad