Hi :)
* Antonio Radici <anto...@dyne.org> [2009-08-03 12:02:56 CEST]:
> On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 11:47:07AM +0200, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
> > Would it be possible to revert that change to the old behavior?
>
> Hi Rhonda,
> unfortunately this change was introduced to have GNU getopt working as POSIX
> getopt (see http://dev.mutt.org/trac/ticket/3097), so the option handling will
> work on the same way on all POSIX systems.
>
> I understand that this can be an incompatible change and we also have another
> similar problem with 1.5.20 with the handling of new mail notification, which
> is
> different from the previous behavior.
>
> Due to the fact that this option handling was not working correctly on non-GNU
> system I suppose that this change would have been introduced at some stage
> (even
> later); we could fork our code and introduce a patch to support the new
> behavior
> but that would mean maintaining a patch forever and having the Debian mutt
> version to be different from the one shipped with other distro (using the
> standard mutt).
My question is: How many people are affected on GNU systems, how many
are affected on non-GNU systems? Also, this change is also a change to
the documentation and is thus an *intentional* switch away from the
expected and long-standing documented behavior.
#v+
-a file
Attach a file to your message using MIME.
#v-
That's from man mutt in etch, but I now notice that the -a file [...]
documentation change was done before lenny already. So, technically, we
should have complained back then already. :/
> We could ask upstream to provide us with a switch in .muttrc to support the
> old
> behavior but I think that it's better to adapt our scripts to the new behavior
> (if it's possible). At the end of the day it's not a big deal of changes, mutt
> 1.5.20 had entered testing one or two weeks ago and no problem was reported so
> far about this option.
A muttrc switch wouldn't work out, muttrc isn't read in at that point
yet, especially since you can switch which muttrc to use on the
commandline, and this would be a horror in expected behavior:
#v+
$> mutt -a file1 -a file2 -F ~/.muttrc-with-switch-for-behavior
$> mutt -F ~/.muttrc-with-switch-for-behavior -a file1 file2
#v-
Would order actually matter here? What would you expect it to do? ;)
> Rather than rushing and asking upstream to do some changes I would prefer to
> gather some user feedback about this new behavior, and then we could decide
> with
> more data on our hands.
I wonder how many people really are on non-GNU systems and actually are
expecting this different behavior, and since when it is around. I
currently can't really find out when it was introduced, at least 1.5.13
had still the old documentation, the documentation was adjusted for
1.5.15, so the "feature" change would be probably be around since late
2006/early 2007.
Hope that helps a bit. :)
Rhonda
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