Re: debian package 2.8.0-1

There seems to be a curious issue with sound. When exmh becomes
unresponsive, ps shows that exmh has started a process to play drip.au.
I have now turned off every setting that seems to refer to sound.
exmh will now open and run even if started as exmh &

Prior to this exmh & would paint the window but wait forever with the busy
watch showing. If started without backgrounding it would function for a
time but hang when a compose window was open.

As of the end of the day yesterday it seemed to be working without sound. I
will see Monday whether it continues to work.

This version of Mint with Mate is built using Ubuntu. Most of the
repositories are Ubuntu.  (This is my first experience with Mint. I have been
using Ubuntu 12.04.) My understanding is that the Mint group
concentrates on the desktop and user interface. The package for exmh is not
relabeled by Ubuntu or Mint so I suspect it is the original Debian.
Here is what dpkg says about tk and tcl

tk8.5						install
tk8.5-lib:amd64					install
tcl8.5						install
tcl8.5-lib:amd64				install

The sound is being played by play which seems to be part of sox. I can play
the sound drip.au using play from the command line and exmh was able to
play the sound when not backgrounded. Perhaps play does not know where its
output device is when exmh is backgrounded or the main window does not have
focus.

I am not a developer, but it would seem that there is a design flaw or
perhaps there has been a change in expected behavior from a subsystem.
Making a sound is not a critical part of a mail program so it should not
wait forever for an exit response from a child process that has no effect on
continuing the program.

Dale