Why was mail_bsd(1) changed?

[Stuart Levy]

In article <83600 at sgi.sgi.com> vjs at rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver) writes:
>In article <1991Jan24.185356.13375 at alias.uucp>, mark at alias.uucp (Mark Andrews) writes:
>> As a frequent user of Berkeley mail, I was dismayed to find that you have
>> modified the interface. In particular, I am talking about the 'R' and
>> 'r' commands...

>There are several common ways in which the "r" commaond in BSD Mail is
>changed.  One is to exchange the meanings of "r" and "R".  Another is what
>SGI has done.  As I say, this is a very common change.
>...
>In these days of high SGI-BSD compatibility, porting the 4.3BSD Mail
>from the tape or uunet should be trivial, should you want to change it
>back.
>
>Vernon Schryver,  vjs at sgi.com

I'd like to second Mark Andrews' complaint.  Yes, it's reasonable
to have reply-to-all be non-default.  But if you were going
to make that change, it'd be better just to swap 'r' <-> 'R'.
We system administrators could then 'set replyall' in the systemwide Mail.rc
to exchange them back.  But with the command names changed, we can't.

What other vendors have adapted mail in SGI's 'r' = 'R' != 'ra' style?
This is new to me, at least.

At our site, we're just stuck with remembering that Sun and NeXT mail uses
one set of commands, and SGI mail uses an idiosyncratic different set.
Yes, we can replace mail, but we shouldn't have to!

    Stuart Levy, Geometry Group, University of Minnesota
    slevy at geom.umn.edu