Re: [TCLUG:13429] Metamail trouble

["Eric M. Hopper" <hopper@omnifarious.mn.org>]

On Sun, Feb 06, 2000 at 12:51:23PM -0600, Philip C Mendelsohn wrote:
> Can anyone help with what should be a pretty trivial question?
> 
> I try to run lynx (a fast way to look at html documentation, so I don't
> have to post dumb questions like this one.)  It gives me the error msg
> "metamail:  Can't open temporary file!"
> 
> I have checked, and default is supposed to be /tmp, though I'm not really
> sure what it's trying to do.  I checked and permissions on tmp are
> rwxrwxrwt.  I'm not sure if I want the t there, so I tried changing it and
> nothing.  I tried setting the env. var. METAMAIL_TMPDIR, but didn't get
> anything useful.

	I will say, that for security reasons, you want the 't' there.
The 't' arranges it so that only the owner of a file can delete that
file.  Normally the ownership and permissions on a directory are what
determines whether you can create or remove files in that directory.

	Setting the 'sticky bit' on a directory tells the OS that the
ownership of the file determines whether or not you can unlink it.

	A bit of history on the sitcky bit...  It was originally put in
so that you could hint that an executable's pages shouldn't be thrown
out of memory after it exited so that when you ran it again, they'd be
right there.  This was used for things like 'ls' that were run
constantly.

	The existence of virtual memory, demand paging, and the buffer
cache makde ths bit obsolete, so now it's being overloaded for other
purposes.

> So, now it's time to admit that I'm not really sure what metamail,
> called by lynx, is looking for.  I've also peeked in mailcap files,
> but didn't see anything easily recognizable as the source of my
> trouble.  And, while I looked in the .mailcap at home and saw some
> things that Netscape put in there, this seems to be a global problem
> -- i.e., it shouldn't be a user .mailcap, though I did learn that
> metamail logical ands all the mailcap files it finds on it's path,
> rather than taking the last one.

	Your overall problem mystifies me.

	metamail is a program that was created shortly after the MIME
spec was written.  It's a rather nieve implementation of that spec, but
is what several early attempts at incorporating MIME into mailers (like
elm) used.  Since HTTP has leveraged the MIME content-type tags, I can
see why a browser might make use of metamail, but it still seems odd to
me.

	I hope this random spewing of semi-relevant information has been
helpful in some way.  :-)

Have fun (if at all possible),
-- 
Its name is Public Opinion.  It is held in reverence. It settles everything.
Some think it is the voice of God.  Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet
broke a chain or freed a human soul.     ---Mark Twain
-- Eric Hopper (hopper@omnifarious.mn.org  http://omnifarious.mn.org/~hopper) --

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