jmsellens@watdragon.waterloo.EDU.UUCP (04/17/87)
Around here, we tend to use X displays as terminals to larger, central
machines, via rlogins and such, and so our mail typically doesn't get
delivered to a machine with an X display attached. I had a version of
comsat from somewhere that would look in the ttys file and if you were
on an X display it would put up a biff window at the top centre of your
screen. This wouldn't work in our environment, and the version of
xbiff that I recently got (seems something similar to mailtool on Suns)
isn't really what I wanted. So I wrote a program that I called
"biffer" which allowed you to forward comsat mail notification to other
machines, and it will follow chains of rlogins back to the machine you
are actually signed on to. This has the effect of of allowing biffer
to find out what kind of terminal you are actually signed on to, and
acting appropriately e.g. putting up a window if you're on an X
display. It's also relatively easy to add support for other kinds
of special notification, like sunwindows support, if one was so
inclined.
I implemented this with a two line addition to the stock BSD comsat,
an extra subroutine, and a separate program that runs under inetd
called "biffer". I will probably post this sometime in the next
few weeks, but I want to fix it a little first. The only real problem
with it as it sits is that each X mail notification window runs under
a separate process, so if you get a lot of mail, you use up a lot
of processes. I tihnk it needs another daemon to deal with all
the windows, something which I will do soon.
If you want more information or anything, drop me a line.
John Sellens -- Logic Programming and Artificial Intelligence Group
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