/bin/mail replacement (next generation of mailx)
seth vidal
skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Wed Jun 11 14:34:47 UTC 2008
On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 18:28 +0400, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> I would like to propose upgrade the "mailx" package (cmdline /bin/mail
> interface) to the newer source from the Heirloom project:
> http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html . The new source is derived
> from the old one and is fully compatible with it.
>
> Such a replacement (from old bsd mailx-8.1.x to the Heirloom's
> mailx-12.x) is already done in OpenSuse and Slackware.
>
> Initially, the project was named as "nail". Since the version of 12.x it
> was renamed to the ordinary name of "mailx", (because the original
> mailx-8.x no more developed). Under the name of "nail" it is already in
> Fedora. I continue to maintain it as "nail", while the original
> mailx-8.x is used.
>
> Mailx-12.x adds a lot of useful functionality to the "cmdline mail
> command", which seems to be expected long years ago. Without it, some
> tasks can be performed only by TUI or even GUI applications, which makes
> impossible to automate things by scripts.
>
> My initial motivation to add nail/mailx to Fedora was inspired by the
> time of switching to Dovecot IMAP server and recommendation to switch
> from mailbox to Maildir format. The current /bin/mail do not work with
> Maildir, hence it cannot be used for reading mail from cmdline at all
> (until you still use mailbox format). Besides the Maildir support (which
> looks like a strong requirement for the upgrading), there are such
> features as MIME support, encodings, attachments, POP3/IMAP, direct
> SMTP, SSL etc., see http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html
>
> Note, that SSL support can be provided either by OpenSSL or by NSS. The
> use of NSS matches the recent requirements of Fedora's "Security
> Consolidation".
>
Does the cli format break compat with mailx as we know it now? Ie: will
we need to fix an arse-load of cron jobs and what not to behave?
-sv
More information about the fedora-devel-list
mailing list