Subject: Re: bug#2941: rmail's new handling of Babyl files is odd

From: Glenn Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:50:42 -0400

Richard M Stallman wrote:

> There is no way to ask for confirmation when saving a file.

write-file-functions?

It seems wrong to me that now I can end up converting a Babyl file to
mbox with no prompting at all.

> Editing the message should be major; I overlooked that one.
> Please try the patch below.

It prompts me when I abort an edit, which is inappropriate.
Aborting an edit does not modify the file.

If I answer "no" to the prompt, I'm stuck in the edit buffer, with no
way to get back to the regular Rmail buffer. One can just kill the
buffer and start again, but that is not obvious.

> I decided to treat changes in labels as minor, because showing a
> message clears the "unseen" attribute.  Treating that as major implies
> querying hen it shows an unseen message, which is typically just after
> visiting the file.
>
> It would be possible to treat changes in "unseen" as minor
> and changes in "deleted" as major, etc.

You could easily distinguish user-defined labels from attributes.
Or perhaps you should only treat "unseen" as minor.