Re: Fixing report-emacs-bug

[David Reitter]

On 30 Jun 2005, at 20:37, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > As described a while ago, report-emacs-bug doesn't work on Mac OS  
> > X (unless
> > the user chooses to activate postfix).  It swallows bug reports  
> > without
> > indicating an error.
>
> Have you reported it as a bug to Apple?

No I haven't.
I'm not sure what the correct behavior would be.
What happens on other Unix systems when you shut down postfix and run  
sendmail?
The message gets put in the queue, correct? Well, that's what happens  
here on OS X as well.

So the desired behavior would probably be that sendmail gives a  
warning to stderr when it is called, right?

If so, would Emacs actually pick that up (at the right point in time)?
I suppose not, since sendmail is only called when the e-mail is to be  
sent, right?

So in the end, the bug report might actually go to the Postfix  
maintainers, not to Apple - because it's all functionality  
implemented by Postfix.

But I think what we could do is have sendmail.el issue a 'sendmail - 
q' command, which flushes the mail queue if the mail system is  
running. If not, you get this:

lucy:~/Sites dr$ sendmail -q
postqueue: fatal: Cannot flush mail queue - mail system is down

Now by looking for "fatal", we can tell whether the e-mail could  
actually be delivered.

What might make sense is to do that BEFORE starting the mail buffer -  
either when doing compose-mail (is this called by the bug reporting  
function?) or in the report-emacs-bug. If the mail system is live, is  
probably alright to assume that it is configured to actually deliver  
e-mail.

If not - which will be the case in most vanilla Mac OS X  
installations! - , we still have to go through the external reporting  
method that I have implemented.

> As for report-internally/externally, could you post a patch against
> emacsbug.el?

Yes, done (a few days ago).

- D