On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 06:04:30PM +0100, Tixy wrote: > On Wed, 2023-10-18 at 11:28 -0500, David Wright wrote: > > (Aside: does anyone know what "heirloom-mailx" is?) > > I remember it being the mailx compatible program that got installed by > default many releases ago, and it was replaced by s-nail in > 2016. (Possibly as a fork of that orphaned project?) > > I still use s-nail on all my machines.
Before I go any further, please note that "mailx" is the POSIX approved program name for sending scripted emails. "mail" is a legacy synonym, not standardized, because way too many systems have differing programs named "mail" with differing behaviors. There's also capital-M "Mail" which thankfully has fallen out of favor. Now, <https://wiki.debian.org/NewInStretch> says: Users of the heirloom-mailx package should beware: in stretch, heirloom-mailx has become a transitional package bringing in s-nail. However, the s-nail package does not provide mailx. If you have scripts which call mailx -a attachfile ... you will need to rewrite those scripts, or manually change the /etc/alternatives/mailx symlink. (update-alternatives will not work.) See also bugs 858080 and 846062. * In addition, s-nail does not provide a /usr/bin/mail program. If you run mail in a script, be sure to install either bsd-mailx or mailutils. Note: bsd-mailx and heirloom-mailx (s-nail) do not conflict with each other any more. What a mess, eh? (That addendum about /usr/bin/mail wasn't mine, I don't think. Maybe? Dunno, it's been many years.) Of particular note is the "-a" option. bsd-mailx's -a adds additional headers. heirloom-mailx's -a attaches files. Any system that relied on mailx -a somefile ... for sending email with attachments would have broken after a stretch upgrade, unless explicit steps were taken to fix the situation. Before stretch, if you had heirloom-mailx installed, both "mail -a file" and "mailx -a file" worked. After upgrading to stretch, you'd have an s-nail program, but *not* a mail or mailx program, so all your scripts would break. And if you did the obvious thing and installed bsd-mailx as a replacement, "mailx -a file" would try to add a header named "file" instead of attaching a file named "file". So, after the stretch upgrade, you would either have to change all of your scripts to use s-nail instead of mailx, or you'd have to change the /etc/alternatives/mailx symlink manually, pointing it to s-nail despite the package manager's refusal to consider s-nail a valid alternative. I don't know whether mailutils works better in this respect. I've never used it. Since I've got bsd-mailx installed on my home system, and /etc/alternatives/mailx pointing to it, I can conclude that I didn't suffer from this particular problem at home. Which makes sense -- I don't send any automated emails from this computer. Servers might be a dramatically different story.
