[comp.soft-sys.andrew] AMDS compatible "inc" for MH

pst@ack.Stanford.EDU (Paul Traina) (10/05/90)

Has anyone done an AMDS compatible "inc" program for MH yet?

I'd like to be able to use MH, rather than any of the andrew mail agents
for reading my mail,  but I like the ability to have my mail stored in
my AFS home directory.

While I haven't looked at things closely,  I assume that a few line
shell script which sorts messages by time of day (delivery) and renames
them to the next highest numbered message in the Mail/inbox directory
would do the right thing (or perhaps, cat's the messages and pipes them
into inc to preserve locking).

Ideas?

Paul

Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (10/05/90)

I would be happy to collaborate on such a program (``inc'' lookalike for
AMDS).  I would also be happy to collaborate on a more general-purpose
program that takes mail from ~/Mailbox/* and puts it into
/usr/spool/mail/<userid> (/usr/mail/<userid>).  If any vanilla-Unix-mail
wizards want to help, that's great.  The kind of help I would need is to
know the detailed semantics for what ``inc'' should produce, or for that
matter for how a program like /bin/mail goes about appending stuff to
/usr/spool/mail/userid.  Of course, my concern is that there's lots of
customization that people have applied to 

The shell-script approach to amds-inc might be straightforward, but
unless you're careful it might screw up.  If the underlying moves are
done with ``mv'' to locations in the same AFS volume, then you're
probably safe from outages; the Mailbox file won't get lost, but will
either be moved or stay where it was.

If you're concerned with MH locking, you'd probably have to write a
program.  A shell script would probably work OK in a single-user
context, where you're either running native MH inc or your new amds-inc.

Takers?  Helpers?

		Craig