Mercurial > docs > master
comparison ch03.roff @ 14:55ec590cfa07
Wrote about the draft folder.
| author | markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de> |
|---|---|
| date | Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:49:46 +0200 |
| parents | 7ca384d68edc |
| children | 81f703140554 |
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| 13:9e17ad63f7f1 | 14:55ec590cfa07 |
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| 115 change. Even if the `Content-MD5' header field is useful sometimes, | 115 change. Even if the `Content-MD5' header field is useful sometimes, |
| 116 I value its usefulnes less than the improvement in maintainability, caused | 116 I value its usefulnes less than the improvement in maintainability, caused |
| 117 by the removal. | 117 by the removal. |
| 118 | 118 |
| 119 | 119 |
| 120 .H1 "Draft and Trash Folders | |
| 121 .U2 "The Draft Folder | |
| 122 .P | |
| 123 Historically, MH provided exactly one draft message, named `\fLdraft\fP' and | |
| 124 being located in the MH directory. When starting to compose another message | |
| 125 before the former one was sent, the user had been questioned wether to use, | |
| 126 refile or replace the old draft. Working on multiple drafts at the same time | |
| 127 was impossible. One could only work on them in alteration by refiling the | |
| 128 previous one to some directory and fetching some other one for reediting. | |
| 129 This manual draft management needed to be done each time the user wanted | |
| 130 to switch between editing one draft to editing another. | |
| 131 .P | |
| 132 To allow true parallel editing of drafts, in a straight forward way, the | |
| 133 draft folder facility exists. It had been introduced already in July 1984 | |
| 134 by Marshall T. Rose. The facility was deactivated by default. | |
| 135 Even in nmh, the draft folder facility remained deactivated by default. | |
| 136 At least, Richard Coleman added the man page \fImh-draft(5)\fI to document | |
| 137 the feature well. | |
| 138 .P | |
| 139 The only advantage of not using the draft folder facility is the static | |
| 140 name of the draft file. This could be an issue for MH frontends like mh-e. | |
| 141 But as they likely want to provide working on multiple drafts in parallel, | |
| 142 the issue is only concerning compatibility. The aim of nmh to stay compatible | |
| 143 prevented the default activation of the draft folder facility. | |
| 144 .P | |
| 145 On the other hand, a draft folder is the much more natural concept than | |
| 146 a draft message. MH's mail storage consists of folders and messages, | |
| 147 the messages named with ascending numbers. A draft message breaks with this | |
| 148 concept by introducing a message in a file named ``draft''. This draft | |
| 149 message is special. It can not be simply listed with the available tools, | |
| 150 but instead special switches were required. I.e. corner-cases were | |
| 151 introduced. A draft folder, in contrast, does not introduce such | |
| 152 corner-cases. The available tools can operate on the messages within that | |
| 153 folder like on any messages within any mail folders. The only difference | |
| 154 is the fact that the default folder for \fLsend\fP is the draft folder, | |
| 155 instead of the current folder, like for all other tools. | |
| 156 .P | |
| 157 The trivial part of the change was activating the draft folder facility | |
| 158 by default and setting a default name for this folder. Obviously, I chose | |
| 159 the name ``\fL+drafts\fP''. This made the \fL\-draftfolder\fP and | |
| 160 \fL\-draftmessage\fP switches useless, thus I could remove them two. | |
| 161 The more difficult but also the part that showed the real improvement, | |
| 162 was updating the tools to the new concept. \fL\-draft\fP switches could | |
| 163 be dropped, as operating on a draft message became indistinguishable to | |
| 164 operating on any other message for the tools. \fLcomp\fP still has its | |
| 165 \fL\-use\fP switch for switching between its two modes: (1) Compose a new | |
| 166 draft, possibly by taking some existing message as a form. (2) Modify | |
| 167 an existing draft. In either case, the behavior of \fLcomp\fP is | |
| 168 deterministic. There is no more need to query the user. I consider this | |
| 169 a major improvement. By making \fLsend\fP simply operate on the current | |
| 170 message in the draft folder by default, with both, message and folder, | |
| 171 overridable by specifying them on the command line, it is now possible | |
| 172 to send any message in the storage by simply specifying its folder and | |
| 173 name. | |
| 174 .P | |
| 175 All theses changes converted special cases to regular cases, thus | |
| 176 simplifying the tools and increasing the flexibility. | |
| 177 | |
| 120 | 178 |
| 121 .H1 "Paths to ... | 179 .H1 "Paths to ... |
| 122 .P | 180 .P |
| 123 foo | 181 foo |
| 124 | 182 |