MH cleanup and coordination

[Bill Wohler]

David,

Thanks for your interest. You must have missed John Romine's
announcements--he's working on 6.8.4 and a beta has been released.
I think this version is to fix some long-standing obvious bugs.

Most of your suggestions are excellent. John Romine is still the
"head honcho." What I would suggest is that after 6.8.4 is out, he
post a list of "Things To Do" and delegate these things to do to
folks on this list (on an elective basis). Perhaps this effort
would comprise 7.0.

I second your proposals:

Remove FILE internal dependancies.
Make MH code POSIX compliant
Remove unneeded items from distribution:
Allow MH to handle 8-bit messages
Have MH lock all sensitive files (e.g. dot files in folders)
Better MIME handling (composition, display, maybe use .mailcap?)

I would add:

Implementation of recent Content-Disposition (RFC 1806) and
Notary RFCs (RFCs 1891-1894).

While we are removing external stuff, I would suggest making it easy
for folks to use PGP with MH. Whether this means integrating it
with MH proper, or providing a paper that shows where to get PGP,
how to install it, and how to use with MH, I don't care. Email
security is coming. An ambitious student will implement RIPEM in
MH.

> mhe == Didn't this preceed mh-e, which has surpassed it?

This is Brian Reid's effort, which mh-e is based upon. These two
programs are now fairly independent. As far as I know, Brian is the
only one using mhe! He doesn't like mh-e ;-).

Bill Wohler <woh...@newt.com> ph: +1-415-854-1857 fax: +1-415-854-3195
Say it with MIME. Maintainer of comp.mail.mh and news.software.nn FAQs.
If you're passed on the right, you're in the wrong lane.

[Jerry Peek]

For me, the problems are:

- The rate that new releases have come out. I believe that John is
still the manager of an overworked computer support group at UCI.
He has a family, too. My guess is that it isn't easy to juggle
those duties and also maintain MH! But, whatever the reason, the
first MH release in *two years* was only a minor patch release.
Almost two months later, the final 6.8.4 release still isn't out.

- IMO, the development process isn't very cooperative or inclusive.
The mh-workers list is basically dead a lot of the time. People have
posted worthwhile ideas here and on mh-users; some very useful ones
didn't make it into 6.8.4 (beta). After 6.8.4 beta came out, there
was almost no discussion. I found some fairly serious bugs and
reported them; no one commented. To get anything changed, we send
mail to bug-mh; UCI decides whether the change will happen and when;
there's basically no discussion. (BTW, I emailed John directly for
his comments ten days ago and called today; no answer yet.)

Is it right that UCI controls the process, and are we satisfied with
the way it works? (Maybe there *are* only a few concerned users!
This thread hasn't generated much discussion.) MH is in the public
domain, eh? Even if UCI is the official maintainer, is now the time
for MH users to vote for cooperative development, with or without UCI?
I've argued against the idea of a separate non-UCI version before, but
my mind is changing... The alternative seems to be juggling a bunch
of patches, like the Linux fixes that (eh?) are still needed for 6.8.4,
and waiting for UCI to release something official. Am I overreacting??

Should MH evolve faster? Who should do it? Do many MH users care?

--Jerry, je...@ora.com

[Mark Murray]

Jerry Peek wrote:

[a whole lot of good stuff]

> For me, the problems are:

> Should MH evolve faster? Who should do it? Do many MH users care?

Faster - Yes please - but I would hate to see a featuritis monster.
Who - dunno - who were the folks who wanted to do the autoconf conversion?
nmh-workers? Maybe them...
Do many care? Dunno. _I_ care.

M

--
Mark Murray
46 Harvey Rd, Claremont, Cape Town 7700, South Africa
+27 21 61-3768 GMT+0200
Finger ma...@grondar.za for PGP key

[Soren Dayton]

Mark Murray said:

>Jerry Peek wrote:
>
>[a whole lot of good stuff]
>
>> For me, the problems are:
>> Should MH evolve faster? Who should do it? Do many MH users care?
>
>Faster - Yes please - but I would hate to see a featuritis monster.

I think that this is agreed upon.

>Who - dunno - who were the folks who wanted to do the autoconf conversion?
> nmh-workers? Maybe them...

Well, I would be very happy to start working on this. I would also
like to make one request: heavier comments in the code. I tried to
change some stuff and I _think_ that I found the correct places, but I
really think that the code should contain more comments to make it clearer.

>Do many care? Dunno. _I_ care.

as do I

Soren

[Bill Wohler]

Aside from the major issues here, I would sure like to see viamail
moved from the lib to the bin directory ;-).