Date: Sat, 1 Apr 95 15:30:45 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: peter@bonkers.taronga.com (Peter da Silva) Cc: taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw, freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Mail... Message-ID: <9504012230.AA12106@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199504011503.JAA01947@bonkers.taronga.com> from "Peter da Silva" at Apr 1, 95 09:03:14 am
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> The moral is, why not just change the mail delivery software to store the mail > in this format in the first place? Maybe even in the user's home directory > in "Mail/inbox"? Actually, I like sticking the mail in the user's home directory because of wanting to apply accounting. 8-). There's a program for redirecting the /var/spool/mail/<uname> into /home/<uname>/.mailspool-<hostname> (or wherever, based on the user name) called "hlfsd". It's an NFS symlink redirectory like AMD, and compiles with no changes under FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 (sorry, haven't tried it on 2.x). If the mail were to subdirectory after that, this could be an effective mechanism. I agree that the mail delivery programs themselves really want to be modified to use a uniform storage format -- but I think the first step is to get them using common code to access mail items before changing the layout, since that would mean one piece of code to change when you went to that. That's why I suggested a library mail API was the first order of business. This is not to say I wouldn't want to have FS changes; there's a lot of other good reasons for FS changes besides that, though, and a more general mechanism for forks is probably a better platform to build upon to make that happy. You want forks anyway for icon information, destop location and sorting preferences, and application to launch for a given data file. Not to mention callbacks from the file system when a directory currently open for display is changed so the changes are immediately visible. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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