Re: Strange mail/list behaviour? (was Re: Strange apt-get behavior with held packages)
On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 11:28:49AM +0100, J.A. Bezemer wrote:
>
> On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Richard Braakman wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 03:09:05PM -0500, Bob Hilliard wrote:
> > > On a different subject, the perl brokeness that has been
> > > discussed at length seems to have moved out of unstable to testing.
> > > After un-holding emacs 19, I tried apt-get -u dist-upgrade, and it
> > > proposed to remove 48 packages, including almost anything related to
> > > perl. After aborting, I tried apt-get upgrade, and it kept-back 15
> > > packages, mainly perl or perl related.
> >
> > >From what I could tell of it, it wasn't perl, but a dependency clash
> > between apt and debconf. apt 0.5.3 is now in testing, and it
> > no longer Provides libapt-pkg2.7, which my version of debconf depends
> > on.
>
> Note the `>' at the start of the reply. I'm quite sure Richard didn't write
> that, just as I didn't in
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu-0103/msg00023.html
> My saved-messages contains positive proof of the latter. Since Richard used
> Mutt and I used Pine, and both messages took entirely different routes to get
> to murphy, I suspect there's a problem in either murphy's qmail or the list
> software. Ideas?
That's just that way it's always been (tm).
It's a limitation of the mbox format that lines beginning From delimit
messages. Therefore, MDAs (I think) put > before any leading From to
stop them counting as message delimiters.
No bug, just a longstanding work-around for a mbox-format misfeature.
Jules
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