rwaters@jabba.ess.harris.com (Ralph Waters) (04/05/91)
I got elm 2.3 PL11 from wuarchive.wustl.edu, read all of the docs that came with it, configured it, installed it, and used it. After doing all of that, I had a few comments to make about the configuration/installation process... The elm configuration seems to assume that everyone wants to use uucp-style addressing for mail (i.e. host1!host2!user). This is not always the case. My site has an Internet connection, and we want to use that and the domain-sytle addressing (user@host.domain). On our system, very little mail is going to be sent to uucp-only sites. The vast majority of our mail will be sent to Internet addresses. Therefore, we don't have a need to resolve the uucp path to use for mail delivery. Many of the configuration options deal exclusively with uucp paths and uucp mail delivery. It was not obvious what I needed to do to cause elm to work without demanding the uucp-related data files and programs to be present on my system. For example, during the configure, it was correctly detected that I had no uuname program available, but Configure insisted on defining uuname in the config.sh file anyway. This caused elm to complain when using the alias evaluation capabilities. After browsing the source code, I saw what it did, edited the config.sh file to define uuname as '', and rebuilt. Elm also wanted to find the pathalias data file and the uumail-style domains file. If a system doesn't have uucp, these files probably aren't going to exist... (They didn't exist on my system; and until I installed elm, I didn't even know that there was such a thing as pathalias.) I could not get the guides to format properly. I am not an expert at nroff/troff, and I should not have to be to get the documentation for elm. To get a usable copy of the guides, I had to find an anonymous ftp site that had already formatted them in postscript form. Also, there is a lot of information that is in the guides only, and not available on-line. Enough complaining about the configuration and installation. Now that I am using elm, I find it to be a tremendous improvement over the other mail programs available on our system (/usr/ucb/mail and /bin/mail). It is the most user-friendly mail interface that I have seen in a Unix environment. -- Ralph Waters rwaters@jabba.ess.harris.com Harris Corporation GISD, Melbourne, Florida - The sooner you fall behind, the longer you have to catch up -