Subject: mailcap and pine

From: Stephen Winnall <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Nov 1994 16:09:37 GMT

Could someone tell me why Pine ignores the following
mailcap entry?

	text/x-pgp;/usr/local/bin/pgp -f < %s;needsterminal

Exactly the same file works fine with metamail. I have set
up $MAILCAPS to point at the file.

Pine resolutely ignores all my mailcap entries in versions
3.90 and 3.91 under Solaris 2.3 and in WIN-OS/2.

Clearly I am doing something fundamentally wrong, but I
don't know what.  HELP???

Steve

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From: [email-masked] (Trey Harris)
Date: 2 Dec 1994 07:04:30 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>	text/x-pgp;/usr/local/bin/pgp -f < %s;needsterminal

I found this out when I tried to set text/html to start lynx.  So long
as the text in question is 7-bit clean, Pine assumes you would rather
read any text attachment from within Pine rather than have Pine start
up a viewer.

Silly, perhaps.  But what content types to handle and which to
outsource to the mailcap viewers is an important design decision in
any program which uses MIME.  Some programs go too far the other way.
For example, lynx will happily observe a mailcap incantation telling
it to invoke lynx to read text/html, which will observe the mailcap
line and invoke lynx, which will invoke lynx, which will invoke
lynx...
-- 
Trey Harris                              http://sunsite.unc.edu/harris
  System Administrator, Project Isis, Office of Information Technology
                       The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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From: [email-masked] (Stephen Winnall/Oq9)
Date: 1 Dec 1994 14:22:19 GMT

I've discovered the cause of the problem by reading the source of
mailpart.c. Anything in the mailcap file that starts with TEXT/...
or MESSAGE/... will be ignored because there are hard-coded
interpretations in Pine for them.

I now use application/x-pgp and can get on with handling the next
problem now ;-).

As a matter of interest: is it a feature or a bug that users cannot
define their own subtypes for the types TEXT and MESSAGE?

Steve

--------------------------------------------------------
Stephen Winnall, Oq9, Credit Suisse, CH-8070 Zurich
E-Mail: [email-masked]
X.400:  C=ch; A=arcom; P=csh; O=cs; S=winnall; G=stephen
Tel:    (int) +41 1 332 4467        (CH) 01/332 4467
--------------------------------------------------------

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From: Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 1994 17:13:37 -0800 (PST)

> interpretations in Pine for them.

This doesn't sound quite right.  We're still learning about mailcap so it
has been changing, but at least with 3.91, you can specify viewers for
most types that override the pine builtins.  The current attachment index
won't allow you to select a MULTIPART to view so you can never run an
external viewer for that type.  You should be able to run an external
viewer for any MESSAGE type.  If you don't specify one, Pine will try to
handle it.  You can run an external viewer for type TEXT if the charset is
different from the one you have set in your config file, otherwise, Pine
will intercept it before giving mailcap a chance.  If there isn't a match
in mailcap, Pine will attempt to display it.  The other types are only
displayable with external mailcap viewers. 
 
> I now use application/x-pgp and can get on with handling the next

The reason text/x-pgp doesn't work is because Pine sees a matching charset
(us-ascii) and decides it should display it itself. Perhaps we should only
be intercepting text/plain with a matching charset instead of all text types?
 
> define their own subtypes for the types TEXT and MESSAGE?

Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Washington, Seattle