Re: mhbuild: extraneous information in message

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Wed, 12 May 2021 16:29:37 -0400, Ken Hornstein writes:
>>> There's no HARM in you putting entries there.  But nmh doesn't read that
>>> file either.
>>
>>Which raises the question - what is getting into the path so when Laura
>>adds entries to /etc/mailcap, things start working for her?
>
>That's ... a good question.
>
>First, it's not that I don't believe Laura.  But ... I have some questions
>about this.  Like, exactly WHAT MIME types could you not view until you
>added them?  Were they text types?  I ask because there are simply NOT
>that many text types.  There actually aren't that many MIME types in
>general, and I'm wondering what ones you couldn't view and how long ago
>you had to add them.
>
>Secondly ... I knew this had come up before.  Here's the earlier
>message where this came up:
>
>   https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2015-03/msg00009.html
>
>The short answer is FOR DEBIAN ONLY, the distribution of nmh was at the
>time configured in mhn.defaults to use a program called "run-mailcap",
>and I guess that uses the mailcap file.  This had a poor interaction
>with some types and nmh 1.6, but Alexander Zangerl (who is the Debian
>nmh maintainer) said he was going to improve that, so I don't know what
>the situation is under 1.7.  Ralph suggested that there weren't any
>Debian-specific changes in that regard, but you'd need to look at the
>mhn.defaults file on your system to see the details.
>
>--Ken

It's very likely that when I was doing this it was nmh 1.6 that was
running here.  And the things I remember needing to add was a
different mimetype for pgp signatures and a whole host of mimetypes
for things that that supposedly generated 'internet business cards,
and calendaring information', a bad idea whose time I think has come
and gone.  But for a while everybody seemed to be sending me one,
and everybody had their own idea as to what the name of the mimetype
was.

Laura