Bug#488214: make mailx a registered virtual package name
"Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org> writes:
> On 18.08.2010 23:38, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Julien Cristau<jcristau@debian.org> writes:
>>> 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
Given that he said it was working with bsd-mailx, I was assuming it was
the "add header" version.
> To Russ: yes, mailx was mean to replace mail and sendmail (which is
> difficult to standardize, and most of sendmail is outside POSIX scope).
Should we say explicitly in the virtual package listing that packages
providing mailx are only promising to implement the POSIX flags and you're
on your own for anything more than that?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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