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Re: [ANNOUNCE] mutt 1.5.16 released



On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 05:23:44PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > No code at all, unless you consider the parameter substitution to be
> > code... which I don't.
> 
> But I assume that you're not able to give a mailcap that works under
> Mac OS X without a line of code.

I guess I really don't care, since I don't use OS X, and have no plans
to start any time soon.  Even if that's true, it's hardly a deficiency
of Mutt... it's a deficiency of Mac OS X for lacking reasonable
software for dealing with media types from the command line.  If I
ever did use OS X, I doubt I would read my mail there.  Then again,
while there are always exceptions, I tend to save attachments before
viewing them anyway, so it's (for me) mostly a moot point.

[As a side note, I read my personal mail on a remote server, so
mailcap is almost completely irrelevant in that case.  I transfer
attachments to my local machine, in the exceptionally rare case when I
receive something I actually want to look at, since in most cases
that's much faster than waiting for remote X clients -- and then I
need to transfer the file anyway to work with it.  My work mail I
do read on my local workstation, and that's where the above applies.]

> Also your mailcap is simplistic. In practice, you should test that
> DISPLAY is set before starting an X11 client, so that a fallback can
> be used.

I think I'm perfectly capable of figuring out whether I'm running in X
or not...  If I'm not in X I probably can't view PDF files anyway, at
least not in any useful capacity.  Likewise for all the other formats
that involve graphics.  As I said, the simplistic mailcap works just
fine for me.  There was a time when I used to try to get fancy with my
mailcap, and then I realized I was just wasting time over-engineering
solutions to problems which, practically speaking, didn't really
exist.  I've been using this mailcap, or one extremely similar to it,
for around 5 years now -- probably longer -- and have never had a
problem viewing attachments.

Your assertion that I *need* to write code to support all this is
false, and completely absurd, like most of your other points.  I don't
need to, and have not ever done so.  Aside from the aforementioned
over-engineering of my mailcap (which was probably at a time when I
was using Pine, not Mutt), I have never written code to support my use
of Mutt, other than in Mutt's code itself, to fix bugs or feature
deficiencies in Mutt.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.  Or be
required to.

> > If the problem needs solving, that's Mutt's job. 

> The flaw is in vi. This is not Mutt's job to fix flaws in other
> software.

Given that vi is adhering strictly to (at least one revision of) the
rather widely accepted and complied-to POSIX standards, that position
is completely unsupportable.  If mutt is going to continue to be
something other than "just another crappy mailer", then Mutt needs to
be capable of dealing with standards which are in common usage.  I
dare say Solaris, and vi on Solaris, are in rather common usage...  I
won't bother to comment about SCO.

Thanks for this mostly pointless debate.  I've had enough.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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