Re: POP Rmail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> From: gustav <gustav@indiana.edu>
> Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:50:53 -0500 (EST)
> 
> 
> If you still use Emacs' original Rmail with POP under Cygwin, you may
> have noticed that it doesn't work. The reason is that Rmail tries to
> create a file with a ":" in its name, which Cygwin can't do. A simple
> remedy is to edit rmail.el as follows:
> 
> *** /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/mail/rmail.el    Fri Feb 22 05:51:38 2002
> --- rmail.el    Thu Dec 11 21:26:14 2008
> ***************
> *** 1502,1508 ****
>              (if rmail-pop-password-required
>                  (progn (setq got-password (not (rmail-have-password)))
>                         (setq password (rmail-get-pop-password))))
> !            (if (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
>                  ;; cannot have "po:" in file name
>                  (setq tofile
>                        (expand-file-name
> --- 1502,1508 ----
>              (if rmail-pop-password-required
>                  (progn (setq got-password (not (rmail-have-password)))
>                         (setq password (rmail-get-pop-password))))
> !            (if (or (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (eq system-type 'cygwin))
>                  ;; cannot have "po:" in file name
>                  (setq tofile
>                        (expand-file-name

Emacs 22.1 (released in June 2007) and later already includes this
fix.

I guess this is an ample opportunity to call for volunteers to come on
board and help maintaining the Cygwin build of Emacs.  As of now, the
Cygwin build has some known ``stability issues'' (read: it sometimes
crashes during the build or in routine operation), and there's no one
on the Emacs development team who has enough knowledge and/or time to
fix these Cygwin-specific problems.  If things are left in their
current shape, the upcoming Emacs 23, a major new release with much
better Unicode support and other important new features, such as
multi-tty, will be released without any systematic Cygwin support,
which in practice means it will probably not work too well.

If you feel like volunteering, please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org.


P.S.  It is much more Lisp'y and slightly more efficient to say

  (if (memq system-type '(windows-nt cygwin))

than to say

  (if (or (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (eq system-type 'cygwin))

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/