Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh 1.6: character set checks and exmh compatibility

[Tom Lane]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:
>> Apparently, it's also trying to enforce that by rejecting any
>> non-plain-ASCII content.  This is a real pain, mainly because whatever
>> it's doing isn't playing well with exmh: the post simply silently doesn't
>> happen.  That's several notches below the already pretty awful handling
>> of post errors that I was used to.

> AFAIK, when send doesn't happen you should always get an error, and an
> exit with a non-zero error code.  Certainly when a send fails for me
> with exmh I always know about it.  This is assuming you don't use -push.
> So if this is failing, then that's a bug.  If you're using -push ... well,
> then what is happening is exactly what is supposed to be happening :-/

Yeah, I've been using exmh's "async" mode, which is documented as doing
the send in background and returning errors via email.  I see that this
appears to boil down to adding "-push -forward" to the arguments to send.
If I switch exmh to the "wait" mode and try a failing case, I get a popup
window with

/usr/bin/mhbuild: exit 1
mhbuild: Text content contains 8 bit characters, but character set is US-ASCII

so I guess I'll be changing over to that.

> Hm, in theory I see that you're supposed to get email back when push
> fails.  I'm not sure that's been tested in like forever.  I'm not actually
> sure what is supposed to do that.  Ah, alright ... I see there's an alert()
> function in uip/sendsbr.c.  I suspect we're not calling that if mhbuild
> fails.

The problem I've had with it in the past is that in a situation where *no*
mail can be sent, you don't get a notification back.  Not much surprise
there, and I've found that the error message does get left behind in
a file in the drafts folder.  But this mhbuild failure neither sends
warning mail nor leaves any file that I can find.

> Which would happen if (a) you put an 8-bit character in your draft, and
> (b) your locale is set to US-ASCII.  Nmh takes the character set to use
> out of the user's locale.

I generally run with LANG=C, which I suppose would have that effect.
I could probably arrange to override that environment setting while
calling "send", but it'd be easier if send had a command line switch
for it.

Thanks for responding!

                        regards, tom lane