Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!news.cs.indiana.edu!msi.umn.edu!cs.umn.edu!thelake!steve From: steve@thelake.mn.org (Steve Yelvington) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: smail on Atari ST Message-ID: Date: 10 Apr 91 16:15:06 GMT References: <10713@mirsa.inria.fr> <1991Apr09.184253.5423@edm.isac.CA> Organization: St. Croix Valley C and Ski Lines: 45 [In article <1991Apr09.184253.5423@edm.isac.CA>, darius@edm.isac.CA (Darius S. Naqvi) writes ... ] > Is this the Smail that we all know and love that runs on UNIX boxes, > i.e. the mail delivery agent? If it is, then it's covered by the GNU > copyleft, so any version should be freely distributable. The program is Smail 2.5, originally by Christopher Seiwald. It accepts data from standard input, processes the headers as necessary, looks up a mailpath, and pipes the result to either a local delivery agent (lmail) or to uux for execution of rmail on a remote machine. The Smail source code that I have bears neither copyright nor copyleft. Smail 3.x, which is a different program entirely, may be covered by the GNU agreement. I don't know. Smail is written with many assumptions about the nature of the underlying operating system that are not valid for TOS. Several people had to invent some clever work-arounds to compensate for the single-tasking nature of TOS, cover for some rather obscure bugs in Atari's operating system, and resolve other system dependencies. Some of those work-arounds involve altering the Smail source code, but most of them involve writing a C library to supplement dLibs. That library hasn't been released, and since it's not mine, I can't be the one to release it. Somebody else has mentioned a version of Smail for Rodney's Mercury UUCP. That might be worth looking into. There's also an MS-DOS port of Smail (ftp wuarchive.wustl.edu) that might be useful for people interested in whipping up their own TOS Smail. (Actually, after using Smail for quite some time, I'm not convinced that it's an appropriate tool for the average ST-based mail system, which is likely to be a leaf node.) > I'd be interested in using this as the mail delivery agent when > running MINIX, as soon as I get UUCP for MINIX working properly. I think that for Minix you should compile the standard Unix Smail. ---- Steve Yelvington / P. O. Box 38 / Marine on St. Croix, MN 55047 USA INTERNET: steve@thelake.mn.org UUCP: plains!umn-cs!thelake!steve GEnie: S.YELVINGTO2 Delphi: YELVINGTON