sup talk - Oct 2008 - You've got the "From " bug, I'm afraid.

I''m trying out sup, coming from mutt, and I''ve hit what is,
for me,
a show-stopper bug.

sup things that the line:
>From bob:
starts a new mail in mbox files.

I put lines like that all over the place in my mails.

-Robin


-- 
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I''m thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other than the default outcome?" -- http://shorl.com/tydruhedufogre
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

Reformatted excerpts from Robin Lee Powell''s message of
2008-10-29:
> I''m trying out sup, coming from mutt, and I''ve hit what
is, for me,
> a show-stopper bug.
> 
> sup things that the line:
> 
> From bob:
> 
> starts a new mail in mbox files.
> 
> I put lines like that all over the place in my mails.
Do those lines actually occur raw in the mbox files? Because this is
the standard, well-known mbox design flaw, but the solution is typically
for clients to write ">From" instead of "From " when
adding messages to
the mbox.

If mutt writes those lines raw, then Sup may have to be more heuristic
in my mbox scanning. OTOH, we''ve had a large number of Sup users who
come from mutt (including me!), and I think you''re the first
who''s
complained of this.
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>

On 11/5/2008, "William Morgan" <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>
wrote:
>Reformatted excerpts from Robin Lee Powell''s message of 2008-10-29:
>> I''m trying out sup, coming from mutt, and I''ve hit
what is, for me,
>> a show-stopper bug.
>>
>> sup things that the line:
>>
>> From bob:
>>
>> starts a new mail in mbox files.
>>
>> I put lines like that all over the place in my mails.
>
>Do those lines actually occur raw in the mbox files? Because this is
>the standard, well-known mbox design flaw, but the solution is typically
>for clients to write ">From" instead of "From " when
adding messages to
>the mbox.
>
>If mutt writes those lines raw, then Sup may have to be more heuristic
>in my mbox scanning. OTOH, we''ve had a large number of Sup users
who
>come from mutt (including me!), and I think you''re the first
who''s
>complained of this.
I''m coming from (al)pine and alpine. There actually is a line like this
in the raw mbox:

----------------
blablabla
>From bla bli blu
bla bla bla
----------------

Apparently (al)pine doesn''t quote, when there''s not _an empty
line_
before the "From" line. [1] seems to provide a little bit of a meager
reference.
*t

[1] http://qmail.org/qmail-manual-html/man5/mbox.html

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 12:00 PM, Tomas Pospisek ML <tpo2 at sourcepole.ch>
wrote:
>
> Apparently (al)pine doesn''t quote, when there''s not _an
empty line_
> before the "From" line. [1] seems to provide a little bit of a
meager
> reference.
Pine and by inheritance alpine have a very strict view of what
constitutes valid syntax for the line that begins a new message in
mbox format.  It has to have the email address in the correct place,
the date has to be in the correct format, etc., or it doesn''t count.
I believe it has a configuration option for whether it sticks a ">"
in
front of lines that begin with "From " but don''t have the
entire
correct layout.

Other email clients have a much more liberal notion of what
constitutes a so-called From_ line.  Mush/Z-Mail, the email clients
that I used to work on (as in, write the C code for) 15 years ago,
would accept a fairly wide variety of formats, but they all had to
have an address and something resembling a date.

On 11/6/2008, "Bart Schaefer" <barton.schaefer at gmail.com>
wrote:
>On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 12:00 PM, Tomas Pospisek ML <tpo2 at
sourcepole.ch> wrote:
>>
>> Apparently (al)pine doesn''t quote, when there''s not
_an empty line_
>> before the "From" line. [1] seems to provide a little bit of
a meager
>> reference.
>
>Pine and by inheritance alpine have a very strict view of what
>constitutes valid syntax for the line that begins a new message in
>mbox format.  It has to have the email address in the correct place,
>the date has to be in the correct format, etc., or it doesn''t
count.
>I believe it has a configuration option for whether it sticks a
">" in
>front of lines that begin with "From " but don''t have the
entire
>correct layout.
>
>Other email clients have a much more liberal notion of what
>constitutes a so-called From_ line.  Mush/Z-Mail, the email clients
>that I used to work on (as in, write the C code for) 15 years ago,
>would accept a fairly wide variety of formats, but they all had to
>have an address and something resembling a date.
Possibly (al)pine is following RFC 4155, that describes how the "From"
delimiter should look like down in Appendix A... ?
*t

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Tomas Pospisek ML <tpo2 at sourcepole.ch>
wrote:
>
> Possibly (al)pine is following RFC 4155, that describes how the
"From"
> delimiter should look like down in Appendix A... ?
Given the history, I think it''s equally likely that RFC 4155 follows
Pine. :-)  The original mbox driver from the UW c-client package
predates that RFC by nearly 20 years.  4155 is a case of documenting
folklore so that newcomers don''t have to learn it by hearsay.

Reformatted excerpts from barton.schaefer''s message of
2008-11-06:
> Given the history, I think it''s equally likely that RFC 4155
follows
> Pine. :-)  The original mbox driver from the UW c-client package
> predates that RFC by nearly 20 years.  4155 is a case of documenting
> folklore so that newcomers don''t have to learn it by hearsay.
Okee doke, I''ve made an official ditz issue to replicate this
20-year-old piece of work.
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>