Debian and Mail
I doubt I will ever acclimate to the way Linux based distros are maintained as well as the infamous Not Invented Here (NIH) conundrum.
There are two versions of the mailx package, heirloom-mailx and bsd-mailx.
Traditionally both packages have been available for Debian. With Debian 10 Buster, only the bsd-mailx package is available. The heirloom-mailx package is available in the Stretch oldstable branch as well as the unstable branch.
The distinction is important for our migration at work of Ubuntu workstations and laptops to Debian.
In Ubuntu we relied on the mail-notification package to provide popup notifications of mail in the local mail spool. This is a simple check for system mail and not online mail.
Like heirloom-mailx the mail-notification package is not available in Debian 10.
I wrote a simple mail notification script. I tested on my home Slackware and existing work Ubuntu systems. Worked great. The heirloom-mailx -e parameter is valuable for merely checking that mail exists in the local mail spool. From that simple test a popup notification can be generated.
Except bsd-mailx does not support that parameter. That caused the script to fail.
There is a work-around on Debian 10. Install the s-nail package. For me that also meant revising the mail notification shell script with multiple checks for which mailx version is installed.
That the heirloom-mailx and mail-notification packages are available in the unstable branch indicate the software has been patched to function correctly. Why not for the Buster release? This indicates that Debian 10 Buster was pushed to release too soon.
Why does bsd-mailx not support the -e parameter? NIH?
This is frustrating. This is WTF territory.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Debian
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