Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!crdgw1!montnaro
From: montnaro@spyder.crd.ge.com (Skip Montanaro)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Rereading .mailrc (was Re: Auto copy in vm)
Message-ID: <MONTNARO.90Apr11223235@spyder.crd.ge.com>
Date: 12 Apr 90 02:32:35 GMT
References: <CHITTAMU.90Apr8164216@quincy.cs.umass.edu>
	<PIERSON.90Apr11110714@xenna.encore.com> <165@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Reply-To: montanaro@crdgw1.ge.com (Skip Montanaro)
Organization: GE Corporate Research & Development, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 45
In-reply-to: rfm@urth's message of 11 Apr 90 20:27:22 GMT


The version of Emacs sendmail we use here recurses on source commands in
your .mailrc file. We have over 1800 local mailnames aliased in a couple
files, so referencing them when first you send mail from Emacs, or even on
the rare occasion when you execute something like

    mail -s frobboz foo@bar.oz <some.file

can be a real pain.

My solution was to quit sourcing those large files from .mailrc and build a
Makefile to run nightly to create a quick-to-load piece of ELisp. Mail alias
translation is then taken off-line. I now execute

    (load "~/.mail-aliases" t t)

from ~/.emacs.

The GNUmakefile target needed to generate ~/.mail-aliases is:

ARCH	:= $(strip $(shell arch))
EMACS	:= /common/$(ARCH)/bin/emacs
ALIASDIR := /common/all/lib
AFILE := /tmp/mail-alias.el

.PRECIOUS : $(HOME)/.mail-aliases

$(HOME)/.mail-aliases : $(HOME)/.mailrc $(ALIASDIR)/unix-aliases \
			$(ALIASDIR)/crd-aliases
	echo '(message "Building mail aliases... ")' > $(AFILE)
	echo '(load "~/emacs/mailalias" nil t)' >> $(AFILE)
	echo '$(foreach f,$^,(build-mail-aliases "$f") )' >> $(AFILE)
	echo '(set-buffer (find-file-noselect (expand-file-name "~/.mail-aliases")))' >> $(AFILE)
	echo "(erase-buffer) (insert \"(setq mail-aliases '\n\")" >> $(AFILE)
	echo '(insert (format "%s\n" mail-aliases)) (insert ")\n")' >> $(AFILE)
	echo '(save-buffer) (kill-buffer (current-buffer))' >> $(AFILE)
	echo '(message "Building mail aliases... Done")' >> $(AFILE)
	$(EMACS) -batch -l $(AFILE)
	rm -f $(AFILE)

Executing the above Make actions on my SPARCStation takes about 1 minute.
Loading the ~/.mail-aliases takes about 1 second.

--
Skip (montanaro@crdgw1.ge.com)