Re: [PATCH] Fix MH-E mail composition with GNU Mailutils

[Mike Kupfer <mkupfer@alum.berkeley.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > From: Mike Kupfer <mkupfer@alum.berkeley.edu>
> > Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2018 12:00:40 -0700
> > 
> > Currently, trying to compose a message using MH-E with Mailutils fails:
> > no composition buffer is created, and the user gets an obscure error
> > message about deleting a non-empty directory.  This has been broken for
> > awhile (i.e., it's not a regression in 26.1), but the fix is pretty
> > simple.  Is this okay for emacs-26?
> 
> Please at least explain the reason(s) for the problem.  How else can
> we reason about the necessity and risk(s) of getting this into
> emacs-26.

The problem comes about because of the way MH-E deals with some versions
of nmh, which use a non-simple-text templating mechanism for mail
composition, and which do not provide a convenient interface for MH-E
mail composition.  MH-E creates the draft email in a temporary folder
and then removes the temporary folder, as part of setting up the
composition buffer.  Right now MH-E knows about the metadata file that
nmh creates during the creation of the draft email, but Mailutils-MH has
at least one other metadata file.  So when MH-E tries to delete the
temporary folder, the deletion errors out, which aborts the rest of the
composition steps.

> And shouldn't we invite the MH-E developers to this discussion?

I posted this patch on June 7 on the MH-E developers list; see
https://sourceforge.net/p/mh-e/mailman/mh-e-devel/?viewmonth=201806 for
what little discussion there was.

mike