[comp.mail.mh] HP's changes to MH 6.6 - Part 1

marvit%hplpm@HPLABS.HP.COM (Peter Marvit) (09/05/88)

Well, after a bit of finagling and a long delay, I'd like to offer the
changes we've made to MH6.6 to the user community.  In this message, I
offer the list of "user-visible" changes to the stock MH6.6.  The next
message is the file by file change chronicle, since it's probably more
accurate. 

If enough people are interested, I'll post the changes; I'd rather not
satisfy tons of individual requests, however. Many of the changes I'd like
to see incorporated into the "standard" distribution.  I leave it to you
to decide which.

	-Peter Marvit
	 HP Labs

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This logs paralllels HP-CHANGES which records all the HP specific changes
which are made to MH6.6, as distributed from louie.del.edu.  Most man pages
reflect visible changes. However, this file describes what the user will
notice:

send and post will use the BIND nameserver/resolver code.

The maximum number of folders you can have has been increased to 300.

Increased the number of messages you can have in a sequence to over 3000.

Saying 'folder +a/b/c/d' will recursively create the appropriate
directories/folders.

inc now has a few teeny security holes clamped shut.

mark has a new option: "-[no]lock".  Before, if you forked a number of
marks in the background, they could collide and clobber a folder's
.mh_sequences... rendering it unreadable. "-lock" (the default) happily
enforces that only one mark will happen at a time, while others pending
will wait patiently.

mhl and forw now have a visible "-[no]dashmunging" switch.  It is used to
prevent the prepending of "- " to lines which begin with dashes.  Note that
if you use "-nodash" when forwarding digests, bursters in the other side
will get confused. It used to be a hidden option.

show has hoooks for the "Face server" which will display the sender's mug
in an X window.  No one in HP has it completely working, though.  This is
not really an HP addition, but a change from MH6.5.

slocal has a new switch "-[no]unixstyle" (strictly it should be uucpstyle)
to specify whether slocal should use UNIX mail style when dumping messages
into a file.  The default is "-unixstyle".  Also changed to actually look
at the message protection variable in mh_profile -- if the profile exists.
Otherwise message protection is set to the default created at mhconfig
time.  If slocal is delivering to an "official" maildrop, appropriate
ownerships and permissions get set. An undocumented "n" for .maildelivery
adds a logical AND capability.

sortm will sort on subject major, date minor with the "-subject" switch.  To
preserve old behavior, a "-[no]pack" was added (-pack being default) in
case you really didn't want to pack the folder.  You can now sort parts of
folders, although you can only pack an entire folder.

mhmail looks at a users' .mh_profile, especially useful for alias expansion.

rcvdist accepts the "-aliases" option.