/bin/mail replacement (next generation of mailx)

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 18:28 +0400, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> I would like to propose upgrade the "mailx" package (cmdline /bin/mail 
> interface) to the newer source from the Heirloom project: 
> http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html . The new source is derived 
> from the old one and is fully compatible with it.
> 
> Such a replacement (from old bsd mailx-8.1.x to the Heirloom's 
> mailx-12.x) is already done in OpenSuse and Slackware.
> 
> Initially, the project was named as "nail". Since the version of 12.x it 
> was renamed to the ordinary name of "mailx", (because the original 
> mailx-8.x no more developed). Under the name of "nail" it is already in 
> Fedora. I continue to maintain it as "nail", while the original 
> mailx-8.x is used.
> 
> Mailx-12.x adds a lot of useful functionality to the "cmdline mail 
> command", which seems to be expected long years ago. Without it, some 
> tasks can be performed only by TUI or even GUI applications, which makes 
> impossible to automate things by scripts.
> 
> My initial motivation to add nail/mailx to Fedora was inspired by the 
> time of switching to Dovecot IMAP server and recommendation to switch 
> from mailbox to Maildir format. The current /bin/mail do not work with 
> Maildir, hence it cannot be used for reading mail from cmdline at all 
> (until you still use mailbox format). Besides the Maildir support (which 
> looks like a strong requirement for the upgrading), there are such 
> features as MIME support, encodings, attachments, POP3/IMAP, direct 
> SMTP, SSL etc., see http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html
> 
> Note, that SSL support can be provided either by OpenSSL or by NSS. The 
> use of NSS matches the recent requirements of Fedora's "Security 
> Consolidation".
> 

Does the cli format break compat with mailx as we know it now? Ie: will
we need to fix an arse-load of  cron jobs and what not to behave?

-sv