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 r...@apologia.fra 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
