Hello again. Ralph Corderoy <[email protected]> wrote: |The ~/dead.letter created by s-nail's mail(1) isn't mbox format. It's
This is even standardized behaviour. |just a catenation of email bodies over time. This means subject, etc., That contradicts the standard and at a glance back to 6th edition Unix. But then again that mechanism is so under-developed... |are lost when a user INTRs twice, and it's tedious to pull the file |apart and back into emails. I'm sorry. The idea seems to be to be able to restart and load in $DEAD via ~d. I must admit -- only used for testing. |Old memories had me believe ~/dead.letter was mbox format, allowing |simple splitting on /^From /, but I don't think this BSD mail program |has done that in s-nail's lineage? I've certainly experienced |mbox-format ~/dead.letters, and see sendmail(8) also writes to the file, |and is probably not alone. I've checked sendmail/deliver.c's mailfile() |and it writes mbox; "putfromline". Interesting: You are right in that the standard explicitly requires the From_ line to be written. I have rewritten it!, and now we at least produce the From_ line which makes this an MBOX. It is still not compliant because we don't produce any header lines, maybe i can do something about that before v14.9 and will fix it up, but i can't promise that. On [crawl] for at least one more week, though. |So I guess I'm asking if anyone knows the history of this discrepancy? |Both have a BSD heritage. mbox format is arguably better than cat'd |bodies, so s-nail could grow an option to use that format. By default? |But I'm more interested in any archaeology folks have. I admit the [timeline] branch is not complete, probably it will never be (maybe someday i'll clone Spinellis' [1], but that is gigabytes of data, but if, maybe a completely new repo for s-mailx? But tags there are not so many, last time i looked -- so much more than we have, that is), but i think the relevant answers it can give. [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo.git Aside from that i am really looking forward for postponing etc., but really not with the current execution paths, i already have written too much code that won't survive the rewrite and is thus doubled work. But it is terrible, terrible, and i hate it. Ciao, and a nice metallic Sunday! --steffen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ __________________________________ [email protected]
