Re: Cygwin, mutt, Windows XP issues

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Tue, 20 May 2003, Peter Davis wrote:

> I'm using mutt 1.4i under Cygwin on Windows XP.  My apologies for
> cross-posting, but I'm really not sure if the problems I'm having are
> mutt issues or Cygwin issues.  (Probably XP issues, but there's not
> much help for that.)
>
> I'm running XP on two different systems.  One (home) was formerly NT4,
> and one (work) was formerly Win2000.  In upgrading to both of these
> systems, some new problems with mutt were introduced.  Specifically:
>
> 1) Mutt no longer can tell which mailboxes contain new mail.  Once I
>    open the mailbox, the new messages are correctly marked, but when
>    I'm looking for a mailbox with unread messages, mutt doesn't detect
>    any.  This used to work correctly under NT4, but *not* under
>    Win2000.  It may have to do with changes in how Windows handles
>    file protections, but I've tried to un-protect these files in every
>    imaginable way, and still can't get this to work.
>
>    I've looked at the mutt code somewhat, and it appears that mutt is
>    checking the timestamp on the .mh_sequences file to detect
>    mailboxes with new messages, but actually reading the .mh_sequences
>    file to mark the new messages.  So it seems as if mutt is able to
>    read the file, but not to get the correct timestamp.  That seems
>    very weird to me.

Peter,

This one is most likely an XP protection issue.  IIRC, the timestamp is
not stored in the file itself, but in a directory containing that file.
Therefore, you'll need to allow the same read access to the directory
containing the .mh_sequences file that you allow for the file itself.

> 2) I have some Perl scripts I run from mutt.  One of them parses a
>    piped in email message and records some information from the
>    message header.  This works fine if I am viewing the message in
>    mutt's pager, and pipe it to the script.  But if I tag some
>    messages in mutt's index, and try to pipe them all (I do have
>    pipe_split set to "yes"), I get "File not found" errors on the Perl
>    script.  This used to work on both NT and Win2000.

Can you insert some debugging print statements into the Perl scripts
themselves, and see *exactly* which files they try to open (including
whitespace and special characters)?  This may be the line ending issue all
over again...  Or, it could be a shell quoting issue (if mutt passes
backslashes through a shell without properly escaping them)

> I'm willing to try debugging mutt, but I'm not sure what's a
> reasonable way to debug a curses-based application in a Cygwin
> environment.  I'm open to any suggestions here.
>
> Any clues on any of this?
>
> Thanks very much.
> -pd

Hope the above helps,
	Igor
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