s-nail alternatives missing in zesty

[Christophe Lyon]

Hello,
Until Ubuntu 16.10, I had alternatives pointing to s-nail (mail, mailx, ....), which is no longer the case after I upgraded to 17.04.

Now, I have alternatives pointing to mailutils (which got installed when I installed google-earth-stable).

My problem being that the replacement is not 100% compatible. Is this is bug in s-nail, or a feature of the new version?

I tried to uninstall mailutils, uninstall+re-install s-nail but this did recreate the alternative links.

[Steffen (Daode) Nurpmeso (sdaoden)]

Good evening.

Christophe Lyon <email address hidden> wrote:
 |Public bug reported:
 |
 |Hello,
 |Until Ubuntu 16.10, I had alternatives pointing to s-nail (mail, mailx, \
 |....), which is no longer the case after I upgraded to 17.04.
 |
 |Now, I have alternatives pointing to mailutils (which got installed when
 |I installed google-earth-stable).
 |
 |My problem being that the replacement is not 100% compatible. Is this is
 |bug in s-nail, or a feature of the new version?

The Debian package of this MUA (i maintain the code of) has been
changed to no longer provide the alternative links to mailx, as
far as i know, see [1] upon interest. I personally only ever used
Debian Woody and do not really know about the alternate mechanism.
I Cc: the Debian (from which Ubuntu inherits the) package
maintainer who does.
It is definitely not a problem of the MUA itself, who tries more
and more to comply to the mailx POSIX standard.

  [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=858080

 |I tried to uninstall mailutils, uninstall+re-install s-nail but this did
 |recreate the alternative links.

You could try to place a mail symbolic link into your $PATH before
/usr/bin etc., which may be sufficient for your use case? As in

  ?0[steffen@wales nail.git]$ command -v mail
  /bin/mail
  ?0[steffen@wales nail.git]$ mkdir -p $HOME/usr/bin
  ?0[steffen@wales nail.git]$ export PATH=$HOME/usr/bin:$PATH
  ?0[steffen@wales nail.git]$ ln -s /home/steffen/usr/bin/s-nail $HOME/usr/bin/mail
  ?0[steffen@wales nail.git]$ command -v mail
  /home/steffen/usr/bin/mail

--steffen
|
|Ralph says i must not use signatures which spread the light!

[Christophe Lyon (christophe-lyon)]

Thanks, this was very informative.

I managed to update mailutils.conf to do want I wanted, so I guess I won't need s-nail, sorry.

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

This has to be fixed in Debian, and will likely require a wrapper of some kind.