Package: uw-mailutils Version: 7:2002edebian1-13 Severity: minor The mailutil man page says, in the Arguments section The arguments are standard c-client mailbox names. A variety of mailbox name formats and types of mailboxes are supported by c-client; examples of the most common forms of names are: and later See your system manager for more information about the types of mailboxes which are available on your system.
This poses two challenges. First, there is no obvious place to discover what "the standard c-client mailbox names" are, and I don't think this binary package (uw-mailutils) has that information anywhere. This meant, for example, when I saw references to /ssl in the FAQ I didn't even know where it went. I was interested only in mailutils, not the full server (I use cyrus, and the docs specifically recommend using the UW tools for migration). Second, the person who installs this package (that's the "system manager") is not in a good position to know which types are available. Only the packagers know this. Marc Crispin referred me to the file naming.txt in the docs directory of the source for more info, with naming.txt and drivers.txt of possible secondary interest. naming.txt had the information I was looking for. He also said the man page can't be more specific because the precise options available depend on how the program was compiled. I can imagine at least two solutions to this problem. The minimalist one would be to include the relevant source docs files in /usr/share/doc/uw-mailutils/, and have README.Debian alert the user to their existence and to which options are supported in the Debian package (and/or which other facilities are needed for the different options to work). The maximalist approach would be to fold the necessary information into the man page (or maybe some other man page on c-client information). Ideally this would go upstream, though upstream seems a bit reluctant. I think it's both more typical and more desirable to document all the options, and note that some of them may not work. This way, material could be customized to the local system by simple deletion (it could even be done by clever config magic, I imagine). -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (990, 'stable'), (50, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.16-2-686-smp Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Versions of packages uw-mailutils depends on: ii libc-client2002edebian 7:2002edebian1-13 UW c-client library for mail proto ii libc6 2.3.6.ds1-4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libcomerr2 1.39-1 common error description library ii libkrb53 1.4.4~beta1-1 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries ii libpam0g 0.79-3.1 Pluggable Authentication Modules l ii libssl0.9.8 0.9.8b-2 SSL shared libraries uw-mailutils recommends no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
