[Alpine-info] Re: Unexpected exit on opening certain message

[Phil Brooke]

Hi,

On Tue, 7 Sep 2010, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Sep 2010, Doug Barton wrote:

>> On 9/6/2010 7:22 PM, Mike Miller wrote:

>>> On Mon, 6 Sep 2010, Doug Barton wrote:

>>>> On 09/06/2010 08:02 AM, Mike Miller wrote:

>>>> 

>>>>> That message has a PGP signature. Think that has anything to do with it?

>>>> 

>>>> No. Alpine has no knowledge of PGP anything on its own.

>>> 

>>> It had help, but the PGP signature in the message was triggering the 

>>> crash.

>> 

>> Can you explain a little more about how the PGP signature caused the crash? 

>> Aside from my natural curiosity, I maintain a set of filters to integrate 

>> PGP with Alpine, so you're causing me concern. :)

>

> The message by Dan from about 8.5 hours ago noted that he had been usiing 

> Alpine 2.00 on Gentoo with a topal patch that they distribute.  When he 

> recompiled without the patch, the problem went away.

>

> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/phil.brooke/topal/

>

> Somehow the topal "glue" was causing alpine to crash on some messages with 

> PGP attachments.


Over the years, I've had a small number of reports of problems with the 
topal patch to alpine that enables the extra MIME features. 
Unfortunately, I've never managed to replicate the bugs on my setups, so 
it's rather hard to debug.

Most parts of the Topal patch can be turned off via alpine's 
configuration: it's the option
   Enable Topal hack for OpenPGP/MIME messages
which is in the "Normally hidden configuration features" section (the 
Expose Hidden Config makes that section visible).

My long-term plan (as mentioned to several others in the past) is to 
extend Alpine's filter mechanism to handle entire messages rather than 
just the message body.  Then I could drop my crude patches.  But real work 
leaves little time for that right now.  (Anyone else want to have a go?)

Cheers,

Phil.