man page “passes the buck” to a dead end for .netrc docs
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
fetchmail |
Fix Released
|
Unknown
|
|||
fetchmail (Ubuntu) |
Triaged
|
Low
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
The man page says:
“See the ftp(1) man page for details of the syntax of the ~/.netrc file.”
There are a few problems with this:
1) the fetchmail pkg is not dependant on the netkit-ftp package, so the FTP man page is not necessarily installed.
2) even when FTP is installed, the .netrc manpage is vague and neglects to specify the syntax of the password field.
3) different apps use the .netrc file and the syntax they expect is inconsistent (see this bug: <https:/
I had a quite complex password in .netrc and fetchmail was not correctly parsing it so the mail server received incorrect passwords from fetchmail. After a lot of trial and error I almost gave up. Someone in a forum made a SWAG (silly wild ass guess) and said try the bash style of quoting on the password and see if that works. It worked, but no user should have to go through that guesswork. Fetchmail’s password syntax should be detailed in the fetchmail man page.
Changed in fetchmail: | |
status: | Unknown → New |
Changed in fetchmail: | |
status: | New → Fix Released |
Changed in fetchmail (Ubuntu): | |
assignee: | nobody → Michał Małoszewski (michal-maloszewski99) |
status: | Triaged → Invalid |
status: | Invalid → In Progress |
Re 1 - Ubuntu's packaging bug. It is the distributor's obligation to properly integrate packages.
Re 2 - not a bug in fetchmail.
Re 3 - Yes, users can expect as much, but you are right that this is not really viable because there is no such thing as a standard ftp(1). It is not part of IEEE 1003.1. Some systems also have a netrc(5), for instance, Fedora 36's netkit ftp. So: Valid wishlist item.
However, regarding the guessing: you can have the source code, so USTL: use the source, Luke. Or whoever you are.
Will consider documenting netrc for upstream as I am the upstream maintainer, but it is not in my interest to get this back into distros. Package maintainers in Ubuntu and Debian will need to see to that. https:/ /gitlab. com/fetchmail/ fetchmail/ -/issues/ 46