[comp.mail.elm] easy help question, and 2 feature questions

luke@mtung.ATT.COM (S. Luke Jones) (09/05/90)

The guy who maintained ELM for several of us is leaving my area, so 
I've taken it over.  I don't know much about it, except as a user.
For that matter, I'm not very experienced maintaining largish UNIX
apps like ELM, since most of my work the past 4 years has been on
MS-LOSS.  Here're 3 questions, one simple and the others less so.

1.  We're using ELM 2.3 PL 0.  If subsequent patches are in
comp.unix.sources archives somewhere I can get them, but what then?
I gather there's a program called 'patch.'  Where can I get it, and
what do I do with it once I have it?  Tips?  Pointers?  Anyone?

2.  I like to organize my mail in a hierarchical structure.  Right now
I have a structure like
	$HOME/mail			// a directory
	$HOME/mail/mbox			// a folder (i.e., a file)
	$HOME/mail/personal		// a directory
	$HOME/mail/personal/Sept	// folder containing personal
					// mail from September
	$HOME/mail/work			// a directory
	$HOME/mail/work/proj		// a directory
	$HOME/mail/work/proj/zxy	// folder of mail relating
					// to the xyz project
	$HOME/mail/work/proj/abc	// folder of abc-proj mail
and so forth.  I'd like to be able to get a list of folders when I'm
saving mail, so I could supply a partial path and ELM would show me
the folders, e.g.,
	Save messages to:  =work/proj
and instead of saying
	Cannot save message to folder /g1/luke/mail/work/proj
ELM would say
	Contents of folder directory /g1/luke/mail/work/proj:
	  abc	def	ghi	jkl	xyz
Does this seem like a useful feature to anyone else?  

3.  Another enhancement might be to do automatic uncompression.  Disk
space is less important to me than being able to retrieve information
about the xyz project a year from now, but it isn't completely
meaningless to me either.  It would be nice if ELM would look at a
file and automagically un(pack,compress) it, if its name ends in .[zZ]
Any interest in this feature?

I'd appreciate any comments people have on questions 2 and 3, and, of 
course, any help I can get regarding question 1.  Thanks,
-- 
Luke Jones   luke@mtung.att.com    ...!att!mtung!luke    phone 201/957-2733
Openly Interconnected Hetero-  | Quote: "System Test? That's for *idiots*!"
geneous Distributed Networked  | Disclaimer: these opinions are mine, but I
Computing Solutions 'R' Us     | suppose I've signed away my rights to them.

chaffee@reed.bitnet (Not Max) (09/14/90)

In article <2952@mtung.ATT.COM> luke@mtung.ATT.COM (S. Luke Jones) writes:
>1.  We're using ELM 2.3 PL 0.  If subsequent patches are in
>comp.unix.sources archives somewhere I can get them, but what then?
>I gather there's a program called 'patch.'  Where can I get it, and
>what do I do with it once I have it?  Tips?  Pointers?  Anyone?

Do you have ftp?  You can get patches 1-6 from mthvax.cs.miami.edu, in the
elm/ directory.  If you don't have ftp, send mail to bitftp@pucc with the
word "HELP" in the message body.

>2.  I like to organize my mail in a hierarchical structure.  
...
>Does this seem like a useful feature to anyone else?  

Quite.  It's occured to me too.  Is it on the wishlist for 2.4?

>3.  Another enhancement might be to do automatic uncompression. ...
>It would be nice if ELM would look at a
>file and automagically un(pack,compress) it, if its name ends in .[zZ]
>Any interest in this feature?

Yeah!  Shouldn't be too hard to add, either (spoken by one who hasn't got
time to be reading news, much less patching elm).

 - Alex