On Wednesday 25 July 2007 09:40:05 Stuart Henderson wrote:
> On 2007/07/25 09:28, Todd T. Fries wrote:
> > I don't see why this would hurt, because these flavors add functionality
> > that is not enabled by default, one must add .muttrc entries to enable
> > them.  These also (as Brad points out) do not alter the dependencies of
> > mutt in any way.
>
> I'm happy with 'sidebar' but 'compressed' does not need a .muttrc entry
> and the patch homepage (http://www.spinnaker.de/mutt/compressed/) includes
> a warning about mail loss in some situations. I think people should have
> to enable that one themselves.

The text to which you refer on the compressed page states:

  You should not use this patch for incoming mail folders, but only for
  archive folders, because there is no mechanism yet to synchronize or
  merge the (temporary) uncompressed folder (which is created while you
  read the messages in this folder) and the compressed folder where new
  incoming mail would be appended. This implies, that if you read a
  compressed folder with Mutt while some other process (either another
  Mutt process or a mail delivery agent like procmail) writes to this
  folder, the new mail will be lost. So be careful!

Boiled down and applied to our situation, this means:

  If and only if you enable the feature

    and

  if and only if you use procmail or other such things to deliver to a
  compressed folder

    and

  you happen to be reading said compressed folder while a delivery happens

    then

  you will lose mail.

Taken in context, I think this is more than safe to put in because the user
has to be pretty far into utilizing/enabling the compressed folder behavior
of mutt before mail being lost is even a remote possibility.

Further, /etc/mutt/Muttrc contains:

   # Use folders which match on \\.gz$ as gzipped folders:
   # open-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -cd %f > %t"
   # close-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t > %f"
   # append-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t >> %f"

which clearly means it is not enabled by default; examples are given, but not
enabled.

I've further verified by removing such open-hook/close-hook entries from my
.muttrc that there is no compressed behavior enabled by default unless you
add entries to your .muttrc.  I ended up with:

        $ file blah.gz
        blah.gz: ASCII text

when saving an email to blah.gz; with the *-hook's above in my .muttrc, this
results in:

        $ file blah.gz
        blah.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix, max compression

I conclude and maintain that the compressed flavor is safe to collapse into
the standard build of the mutt flavor due to no side effects and requiring
people to enable it to change the behavior of mutt in any way.

Have I convinced you?

Thanks,
-- 
Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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