karlton@decwrl.dec.com (Philip Karlton) (11/11/87)
The following is conjecture based upon looking at the code. Corrections or work arounds actively solicited. The current situation is this. MH has the notion of encaspsulating mulitple messages within a single message. Several functions do this, including forw. There is a utility called burst, that will take an encapsulated message and break it into its various pieces. (I must admit I have never used burst, as I have never used this feature of MH.) Burst works by knowing that each piece is delimited by lines that start with an initial hyphen, and any second character that is not space. The encapsulation routine makes sure that no lines start incorrectly with hyphen, by changing all initial "-" to "- -". [Burst is suppossed to fix up these lines so that multiple bursts will successively unwrap all the pieces. This doesn't seem to work quite right. When I forward 2 messages to myself and then burst them, it tells me message 2 of digest <n> becomes message <n+1> and only the first of the two messages is now in my inbox.] One problem I have been having is that PostScript(R) programs are being forwarded to me and some formatting processors are putting negation signs at the front of lines. (Note that it is hard to tell the difference between a negation sign and a hyphen in ASCII.) When these PostScript files are forwarded, they are turned into syntactic garbage. There are several solutions to my problem. Find the bugs in burst and use it. This implies teaching it to all of the people who are ignorant of MH how to deal with the PostScript files that may or may not be trashed depending on how they were forwarded. Change the algorithm. For instance, if the markers were indicated by at least 2 hyphens in a row at the beginning of a line, then there would be fewer files smashed. Add a switch to prevent forw from encapsulating single messages. PK
pokey@well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer) (11/13/87)
In the referenced article, karlton@decwrl.UUCP (Philip Karlton) wrote:
>Add a switch to prevent forw from encapsulating single messages.
Actually, this switch may already be there, just not documented.
Check your sources. When I added it, it was called "-nodashmunging".
---
Jef
Jef Poskanzer {hoptoad,hplabs,lll-lcc,ptsfa}!well!pokey