Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!jwz@teak.berkeley.edu
From: jwz@teak.berkeley.edu (Jamie Zawinski)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: Re: .MS_MsgDir
Message-ID: <20103@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 30 Nov 89 07:43:59 GMT
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Lines: 28


> An alternative to having to know what the field is, that I'm surprised
> Nathaniel didn't mention, is that you should be using message-server
> routines to deal with the .MS_MsgDir file itself.  Now, if the question
> is really about the format of the snapshots that the message server
> returns to the caller, I understand why you might want to know.
> 
> 		Craig

Actually, the reason I wanted to know is I'm implementing a Messages-like
program on the TI Explorer Lisp machine (which doesn't run C).  I've got
code that reads the datastream (fonts and rasters, anyway) and dumps it
into a Zmacs buffer (the Explorer editor, which has its own format for
fonted text).  I'm reading the bb files off of AFS directly; the Explorer's
file system knows about FTP at a very low level, so I can just open
"spice.cs.cmu.edu:/afs/andrew/usr/bb/..." and read from those.

Now, I'd much rather do this by opening up a TCP connection to some server
and talk to it the way I would talk to NNTP; with a setup like this, I
might not even have to give Andrew or Spice a password, and people without
Andrew accounts would be able to use this code.  But alas, my previous post
asking about this turned up little; someone said "I think SNAP does that,
but SNAP isn't part of the X11r3 release, and I don't know where the source
code is, or if it's protocol is documented at all." I looked around on
/afs/andrew/ and couldn't find snap, so I gave up...  Anyone want to tell
me how to do this the right way?

		-- Jamie