Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: MH verses the "all in one file" MUAs Message-ID: <13801@ncoast.ORG> Date: 6 Jul 89 17:35:37 GMT References: <113461@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1518@cbnewsc.ATT.COM> <113567@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.mail.misc Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 120 As quoted from <113567@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> by argv%eureka@Sun.COM (Dan Heller): +--------------- | In article gregg@cbnewsc.ATT.COM (gregg.g.wonderly) writes: | > From article <113461@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>, by argv%eureka@Sun.COM (Dan Heller): | > I had a personal reply from my original article that stated this | > >And MH is huge, and chews up disk space and inodes, and hard to learn, and | > >slow to use. | | There are many things wrong with MH in this respect. Not only is it huge, | but it *really is* hard to learn. I remember when I first went to SRI, I | was set up with MH by default. I spent hours reading all sorts of doc +--------------- Eh wot? Not really; certainly, it needs better documentation, but that is solvable. +--------------- | But what really took the cake for me was the fact that if your mail is | configured for MH, there's no other UA you can use-- you are stuck with MH. | What if I told you I had an editor I'd like you to try but told you that | if you used this editor, you can't use any other editor on files you edit | using that editor. This is how I see MH's folder format. What saves MH | is the fact that there is no "standard" (even proposed standards or RFCs) | which discuss folder formats or anything similar. +--------------- "What if I told you I had a {word processor/spreadsheet/database}...." I'm not convinced that you have an argument, when it comes to the real world. +--------------- | 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? +--------------- Tell it to ncoast, which is AT&T System *III* (_not_ System V!). Tell it to telotech, which has a mini-SMTP program to let MH in "sendmail" mode talk to an ordinary mailer. Tell it to all the sites that use MMDF, for that matter. +--------------- | > That, I cannot dispute. However, I take up the argument | > that this is not a problem, but rather a feature. If you have ever written | > an MH tool (I have written 4 to date), then you know how powerful and easy | > to use the library routines are. | | 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*. +--------------- Two different issues. MH has an extensive library which can be used to build new MH tools in C. It is also a set of executables which can be used to build new commands as shell scripts. And I find that latter ability to be extremely useful. +--------------- | MH isn't a "library" as you described, but rather a set of commands. You | build a "tool" in front of MH by doing a bunch of popen() calls, or system() | calls, or whatever... Don't you think that's rather inefficient/expensive? +--------------- Flat-out *wrong*. If you're programming in C, you use the MH library. The executables are used for a *shell* toolkit; you are *not* expected to use system() or popen() from a C program to talk to it! +--------------- | design has been completed. The point is, Mush is a library of function | calls, not a set of unix commands. +--------------- See above. +--------------- | In mush, if you can type "help", you've got it just about licked.. | Of course, if you know how to hit "?" that works, too. As simple | as you seem to think it is to type "inc", etc..., I never knew to | do that when I first learned MH. Despite the doc! +--------------- Awwww. Because I can't rewrite the shell to automatically provide MH help, MH is worthless. Frankly, a simple MH help command is trivial to write; call it "mh-help" and you've got it made. +--------------- | > Give MH a try. If you hate it, throw it away (or even burn the tape in | I'd love to look at it again... But where does one get it? Don't tell me | I have to buy it :-). Actually, there's nothing wrong with selling MH | (or software, for that matter -- sorry, rms :-), it just means that I | won't buy it due to my limited personal financial resources. +--------------- Egads. $75 for the tape from UC Irvine, or FTP it from many Internet archive sites. *Now* you're digging. ---- I personally use MH because, unlike you (apparently), I find it *extremely* *useful* to be able to access messages as files and use MH commands in pipelines (*anywhere* in pipelines). Without even having to learn a new shell or pseudo-shell. Then I can write shell scripts to do things for me. I find it difficult to imagine mush being implemented in such a way that I can change my scripts to use it. (Don't bother suggesting that I won't "need" the scripts under mush; they're generally not the kind of thing that can reasonably be executed from a mailer. I tend to use MH as a sort of file cabinet which can be used to transfer stuff between Unix commands (and Unix systems) and storage "on the fly".) Other people will have other needs, and won't necessarily need (or want) MH. Fine. But suggesting that MH's implementation isn't useful in and of itself isn't acceptable. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc allbery@ncoast.org uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu Send comp.sources.misc submissions to comp-sources-misc@ NCoast Public Access UN*X - (216) 781-6201, 300/1200/2400 baud, login: makeuser