Re: Opening mailboxes from the command line

[Jack <ostroffjh sbcglobal net>]

On 2011.10.20 11:44, Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> On 19 Oct, 2011, at 15:15 , Jack Ostroff wrote:
>
> > It works for me, with balsa 2.4.8 under Gentoo Linux.
> >   balsa -o file:///home/jack/mail/balsa
> > opens my mailbox named balsa (mbox) but it also opens Inbox, and  
> Inbox is selected.  Hoewver, if I add "-i" at the end of the command,  
> balsa is selected instead.
>
> Thanks for your reply!  This sounds like the opposite of what should  
> happen, right?
Well - to be picky, -o says open mailbox, not select mailbox, although  
it would make sense to select a mailbox if you explicitly say to open  
it.

> Anyway, I did some more tests to explore this issue.
>
> 1) balsa 2.4.10 under Ubuntu 11.10 and under MacOS X (installed via  
> MacPorts)
> If I specify a mailbox that exists but has not previously been added  
> to Balsa, I get the error message I cited before. If the mailbox has  
> been added previously, there is no error message, but the mailbox is  
> not selected either. The selected mailbox is always the one that was  
> selected the last time I ran balsa.
I'm not sure I would expect balsa to try to open a mailbox it doesn't  
know exists.  In fact, although the file/directory does exist, until  
you tell balsa to create the mailbox, from its perspective, it doesn't  
exist yet.  However, given that it appears you need to specify the  
mailbox by URI instead of just its name, it should certainly know where  
to look for it - although I'm not sure it could easily always determine  
which type of mailbox it is.

> 2) balsa 2.4.1 under Ubuntu 10.04
> Opening a mailbox on the command line works just as expected. If the  
> mailbox was not already added to balsa, it is added first.
>
> This looks like some bug was introduced between 2.4.1 and 2.4.10.
Unless one of the developers can think of what commit might have caused  
this change in behavior, it might take a bisection approach to identify  
it.

By the way, I do agree the old behavior makes more sense and gives less  
surprise.