Your message dated Thu, 04 Feb 2021 20:48:27 +0000
with message-id <[email protected]>
and subject line Bug#946700: fixed in apt-listchanges 3.23
has caused the Debian Bug report #946700,
regarding apt-listchanges: mail notifying of changes has (MIME-?) garbled
Subject line
to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.
(NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this
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misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact [email protected]
immediately.)
--
946700: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=946700
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact [email protected] with problems
--- Begin Message ---
Package: apt-listchanges
Version: 3.21
Severity: minor
(I have a vague memory that I have reported this once before, but I am
not having any luck finding any record of such a report, so I'm filing
this again.)
Dear Maintainer,
First, for background:
When I install package updates via apt-get (which is usually at least
once a week, on average), apt-listchanges sends a mail to root
containing the changelogs which were displayed prior to the final
confirmation prompt for that upgrade session.
For reasons which make sense but which I have not bothered to track
down, when mail is sent to root, it shows up in the pending local mail
queue for my non-root local account, which is named wanderer.
Whenever a new message has arrived in that queue, every time a command I
initiate from a console or terminal exits, that terminal reports a
message along the lines of "You have new mail.". This happens once per
terminal, meaning that if I don't clear the pending mail, I get that
notification repeatedly. In order to prevent that, I habitually read the
mail (thus transferring it from that queue into ~/.mbox) immediately
after confirming the update session.
The only mail client which I have configured to read from this local
mail queue is the one invoked by the command 'mail', which in my (AFAIK,
default) configuration is bsd-mailx, which is installed at version
8.1.2-0.20180807cvs-1+b1.
All of the above is normal and expected, and I do not consider it a
problem.
The actual problem I'm reporting is that when I do this, the Subject
line of the mail which is sent by apt-listchanges appears in a garbled
form. For example (and I'm not entirely positive this won't be
line-wrapped):
---8<---
$ mail
Mail version 8.1.2 01/15/2001. Type ? for help.
"/var/mail/wanderer": 1 message 1 new
>N 1 [email protected] Fri Dec 13 18:40 318/10860
=?utf-8?q?apt-listchanges=3A_changelogs_for_apologia?=
&
---8<---
If I'm understanding matters correctly, this garbling is actually MIME
character encoding.
This was not always the case. Back in the day, these mails would have
un-garbled Subject lines, more along the lines of 'apt-listchanges:
changelogs for apologia'. This is the behavior I would have preferred to
see continue, and would like to see return.
The final mail I have in my archive with this older, non-garbled form is
dated 2016-08-21, and includes the NEWS entry for installing
apt-listchanges version 3.3. The changes summarized in that entry
include migrating the package to python3; I suspect, but am not certain,
that this may be the relevant change.
The first mail I have with this garbled form is dated 2016-08-26.
I did not report this initially because I assumed that it would be
noticed and corrected in short order. After that, I more or less got
used to ignoring the issue, but as it's still suboptimal I'm now finally
reporting it.
If mail clients are not expected to be able to consume this format and
present correctly-formatted Subject lines for user viewing, then
apt-listchanges should not be emitting this format, but should emit the
bare-text Subject line just as was apparently done prior to the 3.x
version series.
If mail clients are expected to be able to consume this format and
present correctly-formatted Subject lines for user viewing, then the
fact that the apparently-default local-queue mail client in a Debian
environment presents this 'garbled' form would seem to be a bug either
in that client or in the choice of default local-queue mail client, and
this bug should be reassigned appropriately.
Although I do not have immediate access to confirm this, I believe that
I have seen this behavior happen on at least two machines (with at least
slightly different configurations), so I don't think it's likely to be a
purely local problem.
If there's anything I can do to help track this down and get this
behavior corrected, please let me know. In particular, if knowing
everything that was upgraded in that upgrade session would be helpful, I
can provide a copy of the exact changelog mail from that upgrade session.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'stable'), (500, 'testing-debug')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 5.2.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages apt-listchanges depends on:
ii apt 1.8.4
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.73
ii python3 3.7.5-1
ii python3-apt 1.8.4+b1
ii python3-debconf 1.5.73
ii sensible-utils 0.0.12+nmu1
ii ucf 3.0038+nmu1
apt-listchanges recommends no packages.
Versions of packages apt-listchanges suggests:
ii chromium [www-browser] 78.0.3904.108-1~deb10u1
ii dillo [www-browser] 3.0.5-6
ii elinks [www-browser] 0.13~20190125-5
ii exim4-daemon-light [mail-transport-agent] 4.92.3-1
ii iceweasel [www-browser] 38.8.0esr-1~deb8u1
ii kterm [x-terminal-emulator] 6.2.0-46.2
ii links [www-browser] 2.20.2-1+b1
ii lynx [www-browser] 2.9.0dev.4-1
ii python3-gi 3.34.0-3
ii w3m [www-browser] 0.5.3-37+b1
ii xterm [x-terminal-emulator] 351-1
-- debconf information:
* apt-listchanges/email-format: text
* apt-listchanges/confirm: true
* apt-listchanges/headers: false
* apt-listchanges/no-network: false
* apt-listchanges/save-seen: true
* apt-listchanges/email-address: root
* apt-listchanges/frontend: pager
* apt-listchanges/reverse: false
* apt-listchanges/which: both
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Source: apt-listchanges
Source-Version: 3.23
Done: Robert Luberda <[email protected]>
We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
apt-listchanges, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.
A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.
Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed. If you
have further comments please address them to [email protected],
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.
Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Robert Luberda <[email protected]> (supplier of updated apt-listchanges package)
(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing [email protected])
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
Format: 1.8
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2021 21:25:55 +0100
Source: apt-listchanges
Architecture: source
Version: 3.23
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Debian QA Group <[email protected]>
Changed-By: Robert Luberda <[email protected]>
Closes: 946700 958874
Changes:
apt-listchanges (3.23) unstable; urgency=medium
.
* Orphan package, set maintainer to Debian QA Group (see: #981890).
* Update Spanish translation of debconf templates (closes: #958874).
* Don't MIME-encode e-mail subject line if it consists of printable
ascii characters only (closes: #946700).
* Fix a typo in man page (lintian).
* Update *.pot and *.po files.
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