Bug#488214: make mailx a registered virtual package name

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

On 19.08.2010 09:45, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "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?)
>
> > 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?

Note: I was replying to your "out of curiosity".

To answer the original question:
I agree to make "mailx" a virtual package.
And I agree to specify that the mailx provides the
POSIX interfaces of mailx

NOTE: LSB 4.0 don't have any extra requirement on mailx.

ciao
	cate