Hello Paride and Ben. Paride Legovini <p...@ninthfloor.org> wrote: |On 2018-02-17 19:56, Ben Wong wrote: |> On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 9:52 AM, Paride Legovini <p...@ninthfloor.org |> <mailto:p...@ninthfloor.org>> wrote: |> On 2018-02-17 18:30, Ben Wong wrote: |>> On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 23:43:45 +0100 Steffen Nurpmeso |> <stef...@sdaoden.eu <mailto:stef...@sdaoden.eu> |>> <mailto:stef...@sdaoden.eu <mailto:stef...@sdaoden.eu>>> wrote: |>>> |>>> So here i as the maintainer of the subject jump in and remark that |>>> the problem of the bug report you pointed to was a non-standard |>>> option of the Debian bsd-mail, our command line is a superset of |>>> POSIX mailx. (Unfortunately v14.9.0 has still not landed, so that |>>> we offer no possibility to define custom headers; and it will not |>>> be the Debian -a i think it was, which, also if i recall |>>> correctly, has been patched into BSD-mail after Heirloom added -a |>>> for adding attachments, which i think of as a logical and good |>>> decision.) |>> |>> I see that Buster has s-nail v14.9, which has custom headers. Does |> that |>> mean we can hope for it to provide /usr/bin/mail? |> |> Hello from the new maintainer of the s-nail Debian package. |> |> It seems to me that, even if now s-nail supports custom headers, the |> incompatibility isn't solved: in bsd-mail the '-a' flag is used to add |> custom headers, while in s-nail '-a' is for attaching files. |> |> While I'd really like s-nail to provide /usr/bin/main, I don't see an |> easy way to solve this issue. ... |> Any idea what Steffen was thinking of doing? | |I think he was just saying that 14.9.0 does support custom headers, but |still not using the Debian's '-a' flag. So 14.9.0 wasn't really bringing |a solution.
I am just jumping in to say that it was very uncomfortable to use custom headers like that from the command line, and that v14.9.7 finally offered a usable command line interface via -C -- it works the same, i think, as bsd-mailx -a. I cannot change -a, even if i would like to (i do not, i think -a for attachment is good), it is part of the codebase from the very start, and you will find many internet references which say that mailx -a can be used to attach files. |> It seems this is fundamentally a problem with Debian packages and |> scripts relying on a non-standard extension. | |The point is, as far as I understand: there is no standard, just |implementations, and scripts relying on them. So no package or |implementation is "wrong". | |> Perhaps there could be a new program /usr/bin/debian-mailx which is |> guaranteed to always work that way, no matter which underlying "mail" |> program is installed. For 'mailutils', it would just be a wrapper, |> passing the arguments untouched. For 's-nail', it'd convert the -a |> syntax to s-nail's customhdr. | |A s-nail-compat wrapper script could be a solution, although not really |a nice one, but such a script at this point doesn't exist... | |> Is it possible to identify which Debian packages require mail to use |> "-a" to mean custom header? |> Something like, grep "mail.*-a"? ¹ | |It is probably not so easy. I think the only possibility here is a |wrapper script that implements the bsd-mail interface using s-nail. With v14.9.7 it should be easy to implement such a thing by simply using -C where Debian BSD-mailx would use -a. (I think.) Thanks for your interest, i hope we serve you well. ^.^ A nice Sunday i wish. Ciao, --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)
