On 2018-02-17 19:56, Ben Wong wrote: > On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 9:52 AM, Paride Legovini <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > On 2018-02-17 18:30, Ben Wong wrote: > > On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 23:43:45 +0100 Steffen Nurpmeso > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > > <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>> 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?
I think he was just saying that 14.9.0 does support custom headers, but still not using the Debian's '-a' flag. So 14.9.0 wasn't really bringing a solution. > It seems this is fundamentally a problem with Debian packages and > scripts relying on a non-standard extension. The point is, as far as I understand: there is no standard, just implementations, and scripts relying on them. So no package or implementation is "wrong". > 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. A s-nail-compat wrapper script could be a solution, although not really a nice one, but such a script at this point doesn't exist... > Is it possible to identify which Debian packages require mail to use > "-a" to mean custom header? > Something like, grep "mail.*-a"? ¹ It is probably not so easy. I think the only possibility here is a wrapper script that implements the bsd-mail interface using s-nail. Paride
