On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 9:52 AM, Paride Legovini <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>> 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. > > Paride > Hello Paride, Any idea what Steffen was thinking of doing? It seems this is fundamentally a problem with Debian packages and scripts relying on a non-standard extension. 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. Is it possible to identify which Debian packages require mail to use "-a" to mean custom header? Something like, grep "mail.*-a"? ¹ Even if it's not possible to find every package that uses "-a", it might still be good to have something like /usr/bin/debian-mailx, so new Debian scripts and packages can be written in a way that doesn't rely on "mail" being a specific implementation. --Ben ¹ More specifically, on a Debian machine with every package unpacked: dpkg -S $(rgrep -lIs "mail.*-a" /) or, to avoid many false positives, dpkg -S $( rgrep -slIP "\bmailx?(?=\s|[\"']).*(?<=\s|[\"'])-a" / )
