From: Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>
To: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] doc: Clarify notmuch show --format=raw description
In-Reply-To: <1397834332-25175-2-git-send-email-amdragon@mit.edu>
References: <1397834332-25175-1-git-send-email-amdragon@mit.edu>
	<1397834332-25175-2-git-send-email-amdragon@mit.edu>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.15.2+615~g78e3a93 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.4.1
	(x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 20:23:29 +0100
Message-ID: <87lhv2h26m.fsf@qmul.ac.uk>
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On Fri, 18 Apr 2014, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> In addition to being generally more precise, this is explicit that
> there is no charset conversion.
> ---
>  doc/man1/notmuch-show.rst | 36 ++++++++++++++++++++----------------
>  1 file changed, 20 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/doc/man1/notmuch-show.rst b/doc/man1/notmuch-show.rst
> index bad868b..2c0f64c 100644
> --- a/doc/man1/notmuch-show.rst
> +++ b/doc/man1/notmuch-show.rst
> @@ -76,22 +76,26 @@ Supported options for **show** include
>  
>  	    http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html
>  
> -        **raw** (default for a single part, see --part)
> -            For a message or an attached message part, the original, raw
> -            content of the email message is output. Consumers of this
> -            format should expect to implement MIME decoding and similar
> -            functions.
> -
> -            For a single part (--part) the raw part content is output
> -            after performing any necessary MIME decoding. Note that
> -            messages with a simple body still have two parts: part 0 is
> -            the whole message and part 1 is the body.
> -
> -            For a multipart part, the part headers and body (including
> -            all child parts) is output.
> -
> -            The raw format must only be used with search terms matching
> -            single message.
> +        **raw** (default if --part is given)
> +            Write the raw bytes of the given MIME part of a message to
> +            standard out. For this format, it is an error to specify a
> +            query that matches more than one message.
> +
> +            If the specified part is a leaf part, this outputs the
> +            body of the part after performing content transfer
> +            decoding (but no charset conversion). This is suitable for
> +            saving attachments, for example.
> +
> +            For a multipart or message part, the output includes the
> +            part headers as well as the body (including all child
> +            parts). No decoding is performed because multipart and
> +            message parts cannot have non-trivial content transfer
> +            encoding. Consumers of this may need to implement MIME
> +            decoding and similar functions.
> +
> +            Note that even a message with a simple body has two parts:
> +            part 0 is the whole message and part 1 is the body of the
> +            message.

Generally this looks good. I wonder whether the paragraph above could be
expanded slightly: my (quite possibly flawed) understanding is that
simple messages don't need to be MIME encoded (at least some messages
don't contain any mention of MIME). If this is correct then I think it
would be worth clarifying that this paragraph applies even to non-MIME
encoded messages.

Best wishes

Mark



>  
>      ``--format-version=N``
>          Use the specified structured output format version. This is
> -- 
> 1.9.1
>
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