On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:44:13 +1000, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:

Hi,

I was looking at the mailx package and was wondering what we should do with it.

We grab the package source for "mailx-8.1.1-fixed" on ftp.archlinux.org... but I have no idea what is "fixed" about it and we still patch the Makefile and for gcc-4. It also does not use our CFLAGS/LDFLAGS when building.

There are options here:

1) grab "updated" cvs snapshot from OpenBSD, which is apparently where Debian gets it from. I'm not sure where exactly the cvs repo is though...

2) use heirloom-mailx (a.k.a. nail). At least I can find a tarball from that, even if it has not seen a release in a couple of years. This was requested in the bug tracker but was closed dues to no-one being motivated to change it after several years.

3) use GNU mailutils. It looks actively developed (had a release in September), and is apparently fully compatible. However, it also has more features and so is not as lightweight... probably going from 100KB to 1MB.

Opinions?

Allan

I'd say go with the simplest solution. I also wouldn't care about 900KB more disk usage these days. So if the gnu mailutils just compile without any patches that might be a good replacement. Pierre PS: I have to admit I usually don't use the mail command anyway. :-) -- Pierre Schmitz, https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre