Bug#952898: Patch to fix this bug

[Samuel Gläser]

Hi,

> I think this would be better addressed by apt-listchanges itself, and I
> filed a report for that: #1020858

The cause of this problem is the maximum of 998 chars in mail source code lines. See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5322#section-2.1.1

78 chars are recommended BTW





apticron uses and distinguish heirloom-mailx and bsd-mailx/mailutils.

This is not about the text itself, but about the encoded one inside the mail source code. So we do not need to change apt-listchanges as long text lines are ok as long as the mail source code is correct. The first one solves this issue itself by detecting too long lines, switching (and converting) to quoted-printable and break to long lines while adding an = at the end of each source code line which should be continued unwraped after rendering. bsd-mailx/mailutils cannot do this. But you can manually set "Content-transfer-encoding: base64" and converting the input text to bas64 while limiting its length using the fold command. I will attach a patch generated for https://salsa.debian.org/debian/apticron/-/raw/master/apticron?ref_type=heads

sglaeser


--- apticron?ref_type=heads     2026-10-02 14:24:59.127655485 +0200
+++ backup.txt  2026-10-02 14:31:47.619363311 +0200
@@ -23,18 +23,23 @@
                        /usr/bin/mailx -S ttycharset=utf-8 "$@" < 
"$MAIL_BODY_FILE"
                fi
        else
+               # while heirloom-mailx can deal with overlong lines by 
automatically using of and converting to quoted-printable, bsd-mailx/mailutils 
cannot.
+               # So in the next lines the input is converted to base64 to fix 
this:
+               cat "$MAIL_BODY_FILE" | base64 | fold -b -w 78 > 
"$MAIL_BODY_FILE".tmp
+               mv -f "$MAIL_BODY_FILE".tmp "$MAIL_BODY_FILE"
+
                # bsd-mailx/mailutils' mailx don't do character set
                # conversion, but do not support MIME either.
                if [ -n "$CUSTOM_FROM" ] ; then
                        /usr/bin/mailx -a "MIME-Version: 1.0" \
                                -a "Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8" \
-                               -a "Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit" \
+                               -a "Content-transfer-encoding: base64" \
                                -a "From: $CUSTOM_FROM" \
                                "$@" < "$MAIL_BODY_FILE"
                else
                        /usr/bin/mailx -a "MIME-Version: 1.0" \
                                -a "Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8" \
-                               -a "Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit" \
+                               -a "Content-transfer-encoding: base64" \
                                "$@" < "$MAIL_BODY_FILE"
                fi
        fi

smime.p7s
Description: Kryptografische S/MIME-Signatur