Subject: Re: bug#31737: 26.1.50; Gnus does not use mailutils movemail

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 17:41:16 +0300

> From: Colin Baxter <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Robert Pluim <[email-masked]>,  [email-masked]
> Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 07:12:09 +0100
> 
> >>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>     >> From: Robert Pluim <[email-masked]> Cc: [email-masked],
>     >> [email-masked] Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2018 23:47:12 +0200
>     >> 
>     >> Are we sure enough that '--emacs' is not needed?
> 
>     Eli> I don't know.  I don't use Gnus, and I don't really know what
>     Eli> that option in Mailutils does.  If someone here can explain
>     Eli> what it does, we can make the decision; otherwise, we will
>     Eli> leave Gnus to its devices.
> 
> According to the movemail man page, the --emacs option is only used by
> rmail not gnus. My email setup uses both rmail and gnus and I've never
> used that option.

The man page isn't useful in this regard, it obviously assumes that no
user needs to understand what that option does.

So I "used the source", and it turns out that this option simply
countermands some configuration settings that users could set up which
will then get in the way of movemail's invocation by Emacs.

As to whether Gnus should also use that option -- I think it should,
because the code in mail-source.el which invokes movemail is an almost
exact copy of its sibling in rmail.el.  It's quite possible that Gnus
simply uses some old version of what's in Rmail.  (In particular,
rmail.el already does what I suggested to do in order to invoke
movemail from mailutils in preference to the version which comes with
Emacs.)

So I'm CC'ing Lars in the hope that he will decide what to do with
these two issues.