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