[5246] in SIPB bug reports
pmail/vi interaction
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Carson T Schutze)
Thu Mar 23 16:53:00 1995
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 1995 16:48:52 -0500
To: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
From: cschutze@MIT.EDU (Carson T Schutze)
HI,
I sent y'all a message a while back about an apparent bug in pmail that
shows up in its interaction with vi. I believe I've now figured out what's
going on and am wondering if it's something you would want to fix or if there's
a workaround.
The problem is as follows. When invoking vi from within pmail
using the "~e" command (with the appropriate env variable set so that vi gets
invoked), it sometimes happens that after exiting vi and returning to pmail,
one gets the "Fatal error in process" message and changes to the temp mail
file are lost. Having encountered this many many times, it seems to me that
this is probably happening because vi returns an error code on exit under
some conditions, which pmail interprets as a fatal error even though it really
wasn't, from vi's point of view. In particular, this seems to happen when
you delete a lot of stuff that was in the tmp mail message before vi was
invoked.
This cannot be reproduced completely reliably, for reasons that are still
mysterious to me, but perhaps someone who knows the internal workings of
vi and pmail could make sense of it.
Thanks.
