Rmail-mbox does not support the "stored" attribute

Rmail-mbox does not support the "stored" attribute

[Eli Zaretskii]

Is there a reason why Rmail-mbox does not support the "stored"
attribute?  And if we don't want it supported, what should we
translate it to when running unrmail on BABYL files? "filed"?

Re: Rmail-mbox does not support the "stored" attribute

[Richard M Stallman]

What is the "stored" attribute?
Maybe I renamed it to avoid a coincidence of letters.

Re: Rmail-mbox does not support the "stored" attribute

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard M Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> CC: pmr@pajato.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:44:04 -0500
> 
> What is the "stored" attribute?

It is the attribute which was set by the rmail-output-body-to-file
command.

> Maybe I renamed it to avoid a coincidence of letters.

It doesn't look like that: the portion of that command which was
setting the attribute was simply deleted.  Here's the relevant hunk of
the diffs between the pre-mbox rmailout.el and the current one:

     (defun rmail-output-body-to-file (file-name)
       "Write this message body to the file FILE-NAME.
    @@ -410,11 +584,9 @@
	 (and (file-exists-p file-name)
	     (not (y-or-n-p (format "File %s exists; overwrite? " file-name)))
	     (error "Operation aborted"))
    -    (write-region (point) (point-max) file-name)
    -    (if (equal major-mode 'rmail-mode)
    -	(rmail-set-attribute "stored" t)))
    +    (write-region (point) (point-max) file-name))
       (if rmail-delete-after-output
	   (rmail-delete-forward)))

Re: Rmail-mbox does not support the "stored" attribute

[Richard M Stallman]

I think I deleted the code to set the "stored" attribute
because there wasn't any support to record that attribute.
(That's because I had reallocated that slot to another attribute
that was more important.)

In Babyl format, any attribute name can be used.
In mbox format, there is a specific set of attributes.
At that time I did not feel comfortable changing the set.

Later on I put in code to add one more attribute.
We could also add the "stored" attribute.
But is it really worth it?  rmail-output-body-to-file
is not tremendously useful.