Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!encore!xylogics!loverso From: loverso@Xylogics.COM (John Robert LoVerso) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: MH verses the "all in one file" MUAs Message-ID: <6907@xenna.Xylogics.COM> Date: 14 Aug 89 18:50:58 GMT References: <113461@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1518@cbnewsc.ATT.COM> <113567@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Reply-To: loverso@Xylogics.COM (John Robert LoVerso) Organization: Xylogics, Inc., Burlington MA Lines: 36 In article <113567@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> island!argv@sun.com (Dan Heller) writes: > Upon further investigation, I learned that MH wasn't portable to any other > unix besides BSD systems. This may have changed lately -- I don't keep up > with MH that much (my loss, I guess). Is it true that MH still only talks > to sendmail as its sole MTA? Are you sure? I know MH handled MMDF as early as MH.5 (1985), and I think the MH.3 from the 4.2BSD user contributed software tape did, too. Anyway, I don't remember anything in MH that forced it to a sole MTA. > Bad excuse. A good application (regardless of functionality; here we > happen to be talking about MUAs) should have a "core" layer which makes > the program function _independently_ of its user interface. MH solved the > problem by making each MH function a separate shell command. Oy vey... > You have to start a new process (fork!?), set up pipes, parse command line > options, read init files (dot-files) and everything *for each MH command*. Actually, I *like* that sort of interface. All you really need is a real machine to run it on. Real multiprocessors (Encore, Sequent) make heavy use of pipes inexpensive (and very fast). When I last used MH, however, all I had was a 750. Blech. MH.6 (which had just come out then) was slow slow slow. MH.3, which I had originally used, was fast and simple. Its just that somewhere between the two, 5 years of new features were added... > Mush hasn't quite been set up to be totally independent of its user inter- > face, but it is so close that it took me effectively two weeks to build > the curses interface on it. And the whole reason I use Mush today is that the curses interface is a very convenient way to read mail fast. It lets me browse my (substantial) incoming mail and junk the stuff I don't want. At the very least, I strongly recommend it to anyone still using the crufty UCB Mail (aka mailx), with that gastly code to rewrite headers when replying, etc... John