[Remind-Fans] {posible spam} Re: SPECIAL, trigdate(), and expression pasting

[Sector11]

I'm sorry but in Dianne's defence, which I'm sure she doesn't need, the manpage
is quite clear:

Under the THE REM COMMAND (line 251) we see:

on line 258:
| SATISFY | SPECIAL special | PS |

and a little further down under the same section on line 303, note the second
sentence:
------------------------------
A SPECIAL-type reminder is used to pass "out-of-band" information from Remind
to a calendar-producing back-end.  It should be followed by a word indicating
the type of special data being passed.  The type of a special reminder depends
on the back-end.  For the Rem2PS back-end, SPECIAL PostScript is equiva‐ lent
to a PS-type reminder, and SPECIAL PSFile is equivalent to a PSFILE-type
reminder.  The body of a SPECIAL reminder is obviously dependent upon the
back-end.
-----------------------------

And starting on line 2921 - all things SPECIAL:

OUT-OF-BAND REMINDERS 
       The SPECIAL keyword is used to transmit "out-of-band" information to
Remind backends, such as tkremind or  Rem2PS.   They are used only when piping
data from a remind -p line.  (Note that the COLOR special is an exception; it
downgrades to the equivalent of MSG in remind's normal mode of operation.)

I'm a noob, but I can read, you took that one line out of context.




On Mon, 13 Jun 2016 02:32:46 -0400
"Ian! D. Allen" <idallen at idallen.ca> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 10:36:52AM -0400, Dianne Skoll wrote:
> > In the case of a SPECIAL, the token following the SPECIAL is considered
> > to be part of the type specification.
> 
> That's not what the man page says.  It says types are one word:
> 
>     MSG, MSF, RUN, CAL, SPECIAL, PS and PSFILE
>     These  keywords denote the type of the reminder.
>     [...] A SPECIAL-type reminder is used [...]
> 
> That says that the type is just the single keyword "SPECIAL".
> 
> I'd prefer that, instead of fixing the man page, you tweak the code to
> always make the trigdate() available for SPECIAL.  You have to make it
> work anyway for "SPECIAL COLOR"; just make the date available for all
> SPECIAL without regard for the following word.  Then the man page would
> be correct.
> 
> If the code can't be fixed, please fix the man page (several places)
> to say that "SPECIAL" by itself is not a complete type and that the
> word following SPECIAL is required as part of the type specification
> and failure to hard-code the word following will make pasting date
> expressions fail without warning, but everything else will work fine.
>