[opensuse] mailx - s-nail provides better features and current development compared to heirloom-mailx
Note to Devs going forward, Opensuse has always packaged heirloom-mailx as mailx. Historically this has been fine as heirloom-mailx was under reasonable development through SuSE 10, and 11. The current package for Leap 42.3 is mailx-12.5-25.4 (which I believe is a 2010 release) By contract s-nail (https://www.sdaoden.eu/code.html) derived from the same codebase and further extended is under current development with the current released version of 14.9.11. While s-nail is a drop-in replacement for heirloom-mailx, (meaning existing options are the same, etc..), it also provides notable improvements. Specifically the `-M` option that allows you to specify how to treat the Content-type for body text redirected on stdin. Heirloom-mailx provides nothing comparable instead relying solely on the MIME type for attachment content type. May be time to move from the 2010 command line mailer to the present day. Give it a look and compare and if it makes sense, send it over to the factory folks. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 10/12/2018 09.03, David C. Rankin wrote:
Note to Devs going forward,
Opensuse has always packaged heirloom-mailx as mailx. Historically this has been fine as heirloom-mailx was under reasonable development through SuSE 10, and 11. The current package for Leap 42.3 is mailx-12.5-25.4 (which I believe is a 2010 release)
By contract s-nail (https://www.sdaoden.eu/code.html) derived from the same codebase and further extended is under current development with the current released version of 14.9.11. While s-nail is a drop-in replacement for heirloom-mailx, (meaning existing options are the same, etc..), it also provides notable improvements.
Specifically the `-M` option that allows you to specify how to treat the Content-type for body text redirected on stdin. Heirloom-mailx provides nothing comparable instead relying solely on the MIME type for attachment content type.
May be time to move from the 2010 command line mailer to the present day. Give it a look and compare and if it makes sense, send it over to the factory folks.
Interesting :-) -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.3 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar)
On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 02:15:32PM +0100, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 10/12/2018 09.03, David C. Rankin wrote:
Note to Devs going forward,
Opensuse has always packaged heirloom-mailx as mailx. Historically this has been fine as heirloom-mailx was under reasonable development through SuSE 10, and 11. The current package for Leap 42.3 is mailx-12.5-25.4 (which I believe is a 2010 release)
By contract s-nail (https://www.sdaoden.eu/code.html) derived from the same codebase and further extended is under current development with the current released version of 14.9.11. While s-nail is a drop-in replacement for heirloom-mailx, (meaning existing options are the same, etc..), it also provides notable improvements.
Specifically the `-M` option that allows you to specify how to treat the Content-type for body text redirected on stdin. Heirloom-mailx provides nothing comparable instead relying solely on the MIME type for attachment content type.
May be time to move from the 2010 command line mailer to the present day. Give it a look and compare and if it makes sense, send it over to the factory folks.
Interesting :-)
Indeed! Werner (maintainer of (heirloom-)mailx) -- "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool." -- Edward Burr
On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 02:21:35PM +0100, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 02:15:32PM +0100, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 10/12/2018 09.03, David C. Rankin wrote:
Note to Devs going forward,
Opensuse has always packaged heirloom-mailx as mailx. Historically this has been fine as heirloom-mailx was under reasonable development through SuSE 10, and 11. The current package for Leap 42.3 is mailx-12.5-25.4 (which I believe is a 2010 release)
By contract s-nail (https://www.sdaoden.eu/code.html) derived from the same codebase and further extended is under current development with the current released version of 14.9.11. While s-nail is a drop-in replacement for heirloom-mailx, (meaning existing options are the same, etc..), it also provides notable improvements.
Specifically the `-M` option that allows you to specify how to treat the Content-type for body text redirected on stdin. Heirloom-mailx provides nothing comparable instead relying solely on the MIME type for attachment content type.
May be time to move from the 2010 command line mailer to the present day. Give it a look and compare and if it makes sense, send it over to the factory folks.
Interesting :-)
Indeed!
Hmmm ... seems to miss e.g. UTF-8 support and some more I had added in past let's if I get this ported and also upstream but this will take a while I guess Werner -- "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool." -- Edward Burr
On 12/10/2018 07:47 AM, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
Hmmm ... seems to miss e.g. UTF-8 support and some more I had added in past let's if I get this ported and also upstream but this will take a while I guess
Werner
You can see how it is packaged for Arch at: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packag... After using both over the years, I finally ended up with a problem heirloom-mailx couldn't solve while s-nail made it trivial. (what raised the issue was answering a question on SO, e.g.) Unable to get output in table format through shell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53693563/unable-to-get-output-in-table-f... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
David C. Rankin wrote:
On 12/10/2018 07:47 AM, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
Hmmm ... seems to miss e.g. UTF-8 support and some more I had added in past let's if I get this ported and also upstream but this will take a while I guess
Werner
You can see how it is packaged for Arch at:
https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packag...
After using both over the years, I finally ended up with a problem heirloom-mailx couldn't solve while s-nail made it trivial.
(what raised the issue was answering a question on SO, e.g.) Unable to get output in table format through shell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53693563/unable-to-get-output-in-table-f...
Slightly off-topic - I use mailx for many small notifications of this and that, all plain text, probably all ascii. If I want more than plain text, I format the entire email body myself and send it with "sendmail -oi ". -- Per Jessen, Zürich (2.2°C) http://www.cloudsuisse.com/ - your owncloud, hosted in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 07:51:29AM +0100, Per Jessen wrote:
David C. Rankin wrote:
On 12/10/2018 07:47 AM, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
Hmmm ... seems to miss e.g. UTF-8 support and some more I had added in past let's if I get this ported and also upstream but this will take a while I guess
Werner
You can see how it is packaged for Arch at:
https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packag...
After using both over the years, I finally ended up with a problem heirloom-mailx couldn't solve while s-nail made it trivial.
(what raised the issue was answering a question on SO, e.g.) Unable to get output in table format through shell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53693563/unable-to-get-output-in-table-f...
Slightly off-topic - I use mailx for many small notifications of this and that, all plain text, probably all ascii. If I want more than plain text, I format the entire email body myself and send it with "sendmail -oi ".
Yep, perfect for you. nevertheless in past I had a lot of customers/users which want to have a working mime detection and some things more. So I have a bunch of patches which if required I'd like to see in a potential s-nail baseds mailx: mailx-12.5-ipv6.dif mailx-12.5-mime.dif mailx-12.5-openssl-1.1.0f.patch mailx-12.5-parentheses.dif mailx-12.5-replyto.patch mailx-12.5.dif mailx-fix-openssl.patch nail-11.25-path.dif nail-11.25-toaddr.dif nail-11.25-ttychar.dif from server:mail/mailx ... also it seems not clear on which version of heirloom mailx the s-nail is based as there seems no usage of wordexp.h from glibc anymore. -- "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool." -- Edward Burr
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 08:15:19AM +0100, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 07:51:29AM +0100, Per Jessen wrote:
David C. Rankin wrote:
On 12/10/2018 07:47 AM, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
Hmmm ... seems to miss e.g. UTF-8 support and some more I had added in past let's if I get this ported and also upstream but this will take a while I guess
Werner
You can see how it is packaged for Arch at:
https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packag...
After using both over the years, I finally ended up with a problem heirloom-mailx couldn't solve while s-nail made it trivial.
(what raised the issue was answering a question on SO, e.g.) Unable to get output in table format through shell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53693563/unable-to-get-output-in-table-f...
Slightly off-topic - I use mailx for many small notifications of this and that, all plain text, probably all ascii. If I want more than plain text, I format the entire email body myself and send it with "sendmail -oi ".
Yep, perfect for you. nevertheless in past I had a lot of customers/users which want to have a working mime detection and some things more. So I have a bunch of patches which if required I'd like to see in a potential s-nail baseds mailx:
mailx-12.5-ipv6.dif mailx-12.5-mime.dif mailx-12.5-openssl-1.1.0f.patch mailx-12.5-parentheses.dif mailx-12.5-replyto.patch mailx-12.5.dif mailx-fix-openssl.patch nail-11.25-path.dif nail-11.25-toaddr.dif nail-11.25-ttychar.dif
from server:mail/mailx ... also it seems not clear on which version of heirloom mailx the s-nail is based as there seems no usage of wordexp.h from glibc anymore.
Hmmm ... an external suid dotlock program is backward to the old dotlocking of heilroom mailx. What was wrong with the old way? AFAIK /var/spool/mail/ is 1777 aka rwxrwxrwxt -- "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool." -- Edward Burr
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 09:35:26AM +0100, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
Hmmm ... an external suid dotlock program is backward to the old dotlocking of heilroom mailx. What was wrong with the old way? AFAIK /var/spool/mail/ is 1777 aka rwxrwxrwxt
Next problem ERROR# ? errors 1. MBOX mailbox contains non-conforming From_ line(s)! Message boundaries may have been falsely detected! Setting variable *mbox-rfc4155* and reopen should improve the result. If so, make changes permanent: "copy * SOME-FILE". Then unset *mbox-rfc4155* ... all my mail folders do use 'From ' as very first tag of a message within a mail folder. And an empty line berfore next `From ' The misbehaviour is triggered by --- /tmp/bad.mbox 2018-12-11 10:42:44.022544988 +0100 +++ /tmp/good.mbox 2018-12-11 10:42:44.718532118 +0100 @@ -180095,7 +180095,7 @@ which should reduce everyone's integrati https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/issues/28 -From clean Mutt source, it shows which patches each distro uses and the +>From clean Mutt source, it shows which patches each distro uses and the Status: O order in which I'd like to maintain them. @@ -295051,7 +295051,7 @@ Hi Werner, over binaries not mention in texlive.tlpdb.xz -From where did you get this texlive.tlpdb.xz? Those binaries are all +>From where did you get this texlive.tlpdb.xz? Those binaries are all Status: O included in the texlive.tlpdb that's in the pretest directory, as far as .... IMHO this is a bug in s-nail as the correct RFC4155 states: o Each message in the mbox database MUST be immediately preceded by a single separator line, which MUST conform to the following syntax: The exact character sequence of "From"; a single Space character (0x20); the email address of the message sender (as obtained from the message envelope or other authoritative source), conformant with the "addr-spec" syntax from RFC 2822; that is those From within the messages bodies are not broken but s-nail does not search for the "addr-spec" which has to follow the startinge `From ' -- "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool." -- Edward Burr
On 12/11/2018 03:47 AM, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
Next problem
ERROR# ? errors 1. MBOX mailbox contains non-conforming From_ line(s)! Message boundaries may have been falsely detected! Setting variable *mbox-rfc4155* and reopen should improve the result. If so, make changes permanent: "copy * SOME-FILE". Then unset *mbox-rfc4155*
... all my mail folders do use 'From ' as very first tag of a message within a mail folder. And an empty line berfore next `From '
The misbehaviour is triggered by <snip>
This will certainly insure openSuSE will have the best version of mailx going! Thank you for your "deep dive" Werner. Strange that the error popped up. I've used s-nail on Arch for at least since they replaced heirloom-mailx with it (? 2010-2012 ?) and have never seen a .mbox problem. The primary reason for the change was s-nail (aside from being a drop-in replacement) was still actively developed, so that problems like this with .mbox can be fixed upstream rather than Arch (or openSuSE) having to maintain a bug-fix patch set beyond any improvement patchset. This is from memory, but I think the s-nail fork was from the last version of heirloom-mailx (if not it wasn't too long before then). Fantastic job you are doing, let us know if it pans out. The ability to specify the content type of stdin is a really nice to have feature. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
participants (4)
-
Carlos E. R. -
David C. Rankin -
Dr. Werner Fink -
Per Jessen