Re: Path modification
On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Joey Hess wrote:
> Jon Eisenstein wrote:
> > If, according to policy, no package is allowed to modify
> > environment variables, how should any package make the needed
> > change? Furthermore, doesn't this violate the policy (in the same
> > section) that no program can require an environment variable to be changed
> > in order to be run?
>
> Policy actually says:
>
> A program must not depend on environment variables to get
> reasonable defaults.
>
> I think others in this thread have provided suffucient arguments that
> it's reasonable to expect mh users to do what they are used to doing to
> get mh to work.
Debian serves as a showcase of sorts for software though, and I confess
that after a couple of efforts, and some really strange and misleading
error messages from mh-e, I have only just gotten nmh+mh-e working
correctly after seeing this thread. Must have glossed over the relevant
section of the man page that required something so strange as a PATH
modification :) I don't think it would be excessively interactive for nmh
to somehow give a prompt notifying the user that the package requires
something that debian packages normally never need in order to work
correctly. Many debian nmh users will be trying nmh for the first time
because they saw the description and got interested, and won't know about
this peculiarity.
Britton
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