Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!convex!datri From: datri@convex.com (Anthony A. Datri) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: Why isn't ATK more widely used? Message-ID: <104319@convex.convex.com> Date: 26 Jul 90 13:34:09 GMT References: <2869@awdprime.UUCP> Sender: usenet@convex.com Organization: Convex Computer Corporation; Richardson, TX Lines: 39 >ATK. tm, the contrib terminal emulator, does not emulate a vt100, the >way that xterm does, and it loses the ability to use cut/paste etc., >when being used by a curses program. I couldn't even get curses/termcap programs to display correctly inside of tm. >- printing for all of ATK is very delicate. It requires that one have >AT&T ditroff, and Adobe's transcript package. Wouldn't another *roff clone work as well? How's Transcript required? >only things that really make the grade are console and messages. Outside of an AFS environment, console doesn't even seem that useful. >course, messages uses umpty-zillion inodes (every message in a separate >file) Don't many other unix UMA's do that? I'm fairly sure that at least MH does. > and hides your mail in files that are hard to run grep on This is quite true. It's not just grep either -- anything that wants to interpret the leading + as a switch causes problems. >Now, if you're just going to run messages and console, ATK requires a >lot of disk and a lot of intellectual effort, to get everything running. I would have liked more information about the whole mail-locking issue when I set it up here. I *still* don't fully understand the issues about mailbox locking, which is why I haven't announced the availability of messages here. /var/spool/mail would be NFS mounted, and while I haven't had any obvious problems on my workstation, I can't encourage my users to use something that might lose their mail when it interacts with binmail on the mail server. --