[comp.sys.next] Improvements for Mail and optical disk handeling

shannon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Greg Shannon) (01/27/89)

In trying to make the NeXT on my desk my "personal workstation,"
I've encountered the following annoying situations which I think
NeXT would do well to address in their .9 or 1.0 releases.

1.  In Mail, why aren't subdirectories of mailboxes supported in a
    natural way?  I may carry on 50 large conversations during
    the semester. When I click on Mailboxes or transfer, I don't 
    want a menu 50 lines long.

    Mailbox subdirectories should work the same way as submenus do.
    click mailboxes (listing top level mailboxes and directories of
    mailboxes), click on subdirectory (which lists mailboxes),
    click on mailbox.

    Same applies for transfer.

    Currently, I can do most of this by opening a window in mail
    on the directory and move around that way.  This is unnatural
    AND it doesn't help when trying to TRANSFER files to these
    folders in subdirectories.

2.  The optical disk is great. It's fun to mount 256K  of storage
    in your home directory.  However, there should be some non-root
    routines for loading, initializing, mounting, unmounting, etc ods.
    I'd like to see the following:

    /etc/groups has an entry optical_disk.  you can use these commands
    only if you're in that group.  Normally, you can only mount
    an od in a directory where you have rxw access (your home directory).

    If you are doing dumps and are in the operator group, then you
    could mount the od higher up and run dump.

    Since these programs will have to use setuid and deal with disks,
    I would really appreciate it if NeXT would write and support
    such commands.

Thanks,
Greg Shannon
Computer Science Dept.
Indiana University
shannon@luap.cs.indiana.edu and iuvax!shannon