Re: [Nmh-workers] Message with repeated content

[Ken Hornstein]

> > Why the first instead of the last? Maybe because that's the way Bruce Borden
> > happened to program reading the lines of .mh_profile, one afternoon during 
> > the
> > American Civil War? Or is there a better reason?
>
>if the search order was "system-installed file first", then using the
>last match would make sense.  but since the user's profile comes
>first, it has to be able to override the system setting, otherwise it
>would be useless.
>
>the fact that the $MHSHOW/$MHBUILD etc variables come in between makes
>no sense -- one would usually view an environment variable as a
>high-priority override, but not in this case.

I think some of this might be simple oversight.

The way readconfig() is implemented now, a new profile entry won't override
an existing one.  So like Paul said, it makes sense to read the files
you want to override everything else first.

I went back and looked; MHSHOW was always read after .mh_profile was
loaded (MHSHOW was added for nmh).  But thinking about this, this
doesn't really make sense; you'd think a program-specific environment
variable should override .mh_profile.  So maybe this is a case that
Richard Coleman didn't really think this through, or it was a simple
bug, or he had reasons for doing it that we don't know.

I think it would make more sense to have MHSHOW profile entries override
.mh_profile(), but that's a post-1.6 change I think.

--Ken