Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!ICASE.EDU!tom From: tom@ICASE.EDU (Tom Crockett) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: messages - a confession Message-ID: Date: 11 Jul 90 12:27:39 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 37 Well, I use messages exclusively, running on a Sun 4/60 with 16 MB, and the performance is generally quite good (I started out using it on a 4 MB diskless Sun 3/50, which was just plain awful). Because it takes so long to start up, I usually fire it up at most once a day, and just use the Check New Messages or Read Mail menu entries to fetch incoming mail. I usually have no significant delays when clicking on a new mail message -- it's usually pretty snappy, even though my ~/.MESSAGES directory and our local bulletin boards are on remote fileservers. I have to agree, though, that FLAMES is unacceptably slow. Surely there is room for improvement here, but maybe not within the context of an embedded Lisp interpreter. Which brings me to another pet peeve I have with FLAMES. Our shop is heavily into scientific computing and numerical analysis, i.e. FORTRAN, and very few of our users are at all comfortable with Lisp. For computer scientists, a Lisp-based mail sorting language may be O.K., but it's pretty intimidating for a lot of our engineers and mathematicians. Given that one of the most useful features of messages is its ability to sort mail, I think a simpler, faster, more accessible interface is definitely in order. I've also considered running a cui daemon to sort my personal mail, as Bill Janssen suggests. While this does have some disadvantages, it should help to hide the sorting delays incurred by FLAMES. We're running a bulletin board daemon which does just that for public folders, and it works fine. Overall, though, I think messages is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Tom Crockett ICASE Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering M.S. 132C e-mail: tom@icase.edu NASA Langley Research Center phone: (804) 864-2182 Hampton, VA 23665-5225