[2018-12-22 12:59] Alexander Zangerl <a...@debian.org> > On Fri, 21 Dec 2018 18:54:41 +0000, Dmitry Bogatov writes: > >please make `nmh' co-installable with `mmh'. > > upon reviewing of mmh's documentation and stated goals i don't think > this will work. i think that mmh has to conflict with nmh. > > it's not compatible with nmh (except in terms of mail storage on disk), > and this breaks exmh and mh-e (which depend on nmh and its behaviour). > > the readme states: > "...rather mmh breaks compatibility to nmh in order to modernize and > simplify it." > > "...my experimental version more and more feels like being a fork." > > for example, schnalke's thesis shows that he's removed pretty essential tools > like post and reinstated spost, which nmh has deprecated completely in favour > of only post. > > to switch some nmh/mmh tools over to the other flavour via > alternatives is doomed to fail in my opinion, because it'll cause any of the > remaining *mh tools to operate on the wrong defaults/preferences. this will > cause nothing but confusion and frustration for users. > > to always switch all tools over, well, that's achieved in a better fashion > by just having one of the two packages on a box. > > unless you can provide me with a compelling resonining and case for > why this mixing of incompatible and overlapping code should be beneficial > i'll close this as wontfix and make nmh explicitely conflict with mmh.
For cases of developing/testing something, that should work with both MH implementation. I did it in past, and I still trying to allocate time to make reportbug(1) work with mmh, without breaking compatibility with nmh. Given nature of `MH', developing of something on top of it is not so unlikely. For tools expect specifially `nmh', we could make them depend not on generic `mh', but directly on `nmh', and give `nmh' higher priority in alternatives system. This way, things will work out-of-box. I would add warning in NEWS.Debian, that using `mmh' as MH alternative, may cause unexpected behaviours from <... list of frontends ...>
