Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!UNIX.CIS.PITT.EDU!cmf From: cmf@UNIX.CIS.PITT.EDU ("Carl M. Fongheiser") Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: Why isn't ATK more widely used? Message-ID: Date: 27 Jul 90 15:06:24 GMT References: <104319@convex.convex.com> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 44 Excerpts from info-andrew: 26-Jul-90 Re: Why isn't ATK more wide.. Anthony A. Datri@uunet.u (1545) > >- 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? I haven't tried it, but groff ought to work. It has all the functionality needed, though not necessarily compatibly. Maybe I'll try that this afternoon... > >only things that really make the grade are console and messages. > Outside of an AFS environment, console doesn't even seem that useful. I'd have to agree with that. I can't even get console to stay running on my PMAX! > >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. Yes, it does, and it's relatively trivial to turn an MH folder into an AMS folder. > >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. Depending on the version and OS you're running, it might work or it might not. 'flock' definitely does *not* work over NFS, and you'll run into trouble if you try to do it that way. One of the many reasons we're looking at AFS here. Carl Fongheiser cmf@unix.cis.pitt.edu