Atari Mega Archive 1/Atari Mega Archive - Volume 1.iso/lists/gem/l_0799/779

Internet Message Format | 1994-08-27 | 1.8 KB

Subject: Re: future suggestion: no motion on delete
Date:     Thu, 14 Jul 1994 08:32:59 PDT
From: John Haxby <[e-mail]>
Message-Id: <94Jul14.083406pdt.14470(5)@alpha.xerox.com>

> I agree completely.  I love being able to use normal MH commands from home
> via a VT100 emulator, while having exmh at work when running X.  I think
> that the *real* problem is that MH needs to be fixed.   It's 1994 and it
> still doesn't lock its state files when writing to them and has arbitrary
> buffer limits strewn throughout the code.  None of this was right way back
> when, but in a world of window based workstations with people running
> multiple sessions and people who get tens of thousands of e-mail messages a
> year, things need to be cleaned up a bit.

Something I've been threatening to do for a while is set things up so that
exmh runs in one MH context and various shells run in another (or lots of
others).  You can do this by setting the MHCONTEXT environment variable to
something like context.tty for the shells and leaving it unset for exmh.

The good part about this is that the current folder won't keep changing under
your feet while exmh does its thing.   The bad news is that is does nothing
to prevent sequences files becoming corrupt when both you and exmh try to
update them at the same time.   If exmh is, or becomes, clever enough to handle
sequences then it could take steps to keep sequences files at least incorrupt
by writing to a temporary sequence file and renaming it rather than trying
to overwrite the existing file.

As Richard said, though, MH still needs fixing to lock its various files, and
the MH bug list has received a report from here at least.

I should add that if exmh *wasn't* layered on top of MH, I wouldn't be able to
use it at all ....

--
John Haxby            [e-mail]
ISODE Consortium        [phone]