Bug#488214: make mailx a registered virtual package name

["Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org>]

On 18.08.2010 23:38, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Julien Cristau<jcristau@debian.org>  writes:
> > On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 12:31:59 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> > > I propose the following addition.  Seconds or objections?  (As
> > > mentioned elsewhere in the file, the * indicates that the providing
> > > packages are using alternatives, which appears to be the case.)
>
> > Is there a spec somewhere about the command line arguments for mailx?  I
> > know that bsd-mailx and heirloom-mailx do completely different things
> > for -a, e.g., which is a major pain, and I'm not sure they should be
> > alternatives.
>
> mailx is specified by POSIX.  POSIX does indeed not specify the -a flag.
>
> (Out of curiosity, if one needs the -a flag to mailx, why not just call
> sendmail directly and pass in exactly the headers one wants?)

What -a does?

Searching on google: two man page don't describe it,
and one as "add attachment" and one as "add header".

So I think portable scripts should not use -a

To Russ: yes, mailx was mean to replace mail and sendmail
(which is difficult to standardize, and most of sendmail
is outside POSIX scope).

ciao
	cate