Re: [nmh-workers] Need help with sending mail

[Ken Hornstein]

Robert has managed to articulate what I only had as vague feelings, and of
course we were presented with someone who actually had profile entries
under 'post' and had a legitimate (if surprising) reason to do so.

Thinking about this some more ... while it WOULD be weird, certainly a
user could symlink "show" to "post", and then a profile entry for post
would make perfect sense.  I cannot think of any reason why you would do
that, but it would be legitimate (and as we've seen, certainly people
do plenty of things where I've said, "I can't think of any reason why
you would that")

>I also think that MH users are (by and large) able to deal with issues
>like this, and preventing the occasional question to the list isn't worth
>the effort of extra code, of making the profile parser bigger and even
>messier (and also forcing a full read every time, which one day might
>be good to avoid - just reading enoughto get the entry needed) and
>just generally being obnoxious.

Weeeelll .... the whole reason this started was because people aren't
reading the documentation :-)  Even Ralph (RALPH!) admitted he doesn't
always read to the end of the post(8) man page all of the time :-)

David brings up the point that on average, it's come up twice a year on
the mailing list ...  and that seems a lot to me.  That suggests to me
at the very least our documentation needs improving.  I think I am leaning
back to NOT having a warning, but I don't feel super strong about that.

So, I went back and looked AGAIN at this.  Currently, only "post",
"install-mh", and "slocal" call context_foil() (the function that
disables the reading of the profile).  And even though David added a
comment about this in sbr/mts.c, whom DOES read the profile (and as far
as I can tell, it always did).

Back in MH 6.8.5, the following programs called m_foil() (the precursor
to context_foil()):

        conflict
        mhmail
        mhn
        post
        rmail
        sbboards
        slocal
        spop
        vmhtest

This ... is an odd list, but there are some things in common.  Most of
these programs are designed be run by OTHER programs; that's true of
post & mhn (other MH programs typically ran them, but not always true
for mhn). rmail, sbboards, slocal & spop were designed to be run as
local delivery agents.  I can't really explain conflict; except maybe it
was normally run via cron?  mhmail was designed to be a replacement for
Berkeley mail, so maybe it was intended that nothing in the MH profile
would affect it.  I have no idea what vmhtest was supposted to do, so
don't ask me about it :-)  To muddle the waters even further, spost
DID read the profile explicitly.  install-mh isn't on this list, but it
did not use the profile to add to it's arguments.

Along the way from MH to nmh, context_foil was dropped from mhn & added
to spost.  That left the other programs, but most of them (conflict,
rmail, sbboards, spop, vmhtest) have been removed as obsolete.  When
David created nmh_init(), he changed install-mh to call context_foil()
(which makes sense to me).  mhmail has been changed to a shell script,
which obviously doesn't check the profile either.

What does this all mean?  Well, people are still confused about it,
which isn't great.  I think improving our documentation would be good.

Did Jay Dresser ever get email working?  That WAS the original point of
this thread, after all :-)

--Ken