pmail-edit inherent problem

pmail-edit inherent problem

[Richard M Stallman]

pmail-edit operates by unswapping, then narrowing to just the one
message in the whole-file buffer.

This works ok when the message does not require decoding.  But if the
message body is encoded in base64, this will give you the base64 text
to edit -- not very useful.

The only solution I can envision is to let people edit
the viewing buffers.  This would necessitate re-encoding
the edited contents and copying them into the whole-file buffer.

Does anyone see a problem in this, or have another suggestion?

Re: pmail-edit inherent problem

[Stefan Monnier]

> pmail-edit operates by unswapping, then narrowing to just the one
> message in the whole-file buffer.

> This works ok when the message does not require decoding.  But if the
> message body is encoded in base64, this will give you the base64 text
> to edit -- not very useful.

> The only solution I can envision is to let people edit
> the viewing buffers.  This would necessitate re-encoding
> the edited contents and copying them into the whole-file buffer.

> Does anyone see a problem in this, or have another suggestion?

pmail-edit is indeed inherently difficult to implement.
I don't think there's another solution than the one you propose.
It doesn't have any "problem" as such, except for the fact that it will
require work (hopefully most of the encoding work can be leveraged from
the code used when composing new messages).


        Stefan

Re: pmail-edit inherent problem

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard M Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:27:04 -0500
> 
> pmail-edit operates by unswapping, then narrowing to just the one
> message in the whole-file buffer.

How does this work when the message is encoded in UTF-8, say?  Won't
you get to edit the encoded text, which is also hardly useful?

> The only solution I can envision is to let people edit
> the viewing buffers.  This would necessitate re-encoding
> the edited contents and copying them into the whole-file buffer.
> 
> Does anyone see a problem in this, or have another suggestion?

I think this is the only solution even if the message is not in
base64.  Only US-ASCII bodies can be edited directly in the mbox
format.

Am I missing something?

Re: pmail-edit inherent problem

[Richard M Stallman]

    How does this work when the message is encoded in UTF-8, say?  Won't
    you get to edit the encoded text, which is also hardly useful?

Indeed, that is what it currently does.
Not very convenient.