Subject: Re: 3.91: How to provide write access to a global address book?

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 10:16:37 -0700

The global-address-book is always read-only.  This saves the overhead of
trying to provide locking for updates.  You can insert a default value for
address-book, but putting it in pine.conf.fixed will prevent users from
adding their own additional addressbooks. 

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

On Wed, 12 Oct 1994, Steven W Orr wrote:

> Date: Wed, 12 OCT 1994 21:20:24 GMT 
> From: Steven W Orr <[email-masked]>
> Newgroups: comp.mail.pine
> Subject: 3.91: How to provide write access to a global address book? 
> 
> pine-3.91 running under OSF1-2.40. I created a global address book
> and provided it to users using /usr/local/lib/pine.conf.fixed.
> 
> My problem is that I want people to be allowed to add/delete/modify
> entries in the book. When pine shows me the addressbook menu it sez
> that the global book is (ReadOnly). What's my problem?
> 
> BTW, the book is given access of 0666. No problem there that I can see.
> 
> Please email. I'll summarize. Thanks in advance.
> -- 
> ----------Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana.----------------
> --------Stranger things have happened but none stranger than this.-------------
> Steven W. Orr      [email-masked]     <site of former bang addr:-)>
> ---------------"Listen to me! We are all individuals."-------------------------
> 
>

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From: [email-masked] (Steven W Orr)
Date: 12 Oct 94 21:20:24 GMT

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From: [email-masked] (Rick Sellens)
Date: 14 Oct 94 13:45:02 GMT

> > entries in the book.

Add the global addressbook file as a local addressbook for the user(s) you
want to edit it, and make sure the file permissions are appropriate.
Multiple users can use the same address file, and even the same mail
folders, provided they have access. It sounds obvious, but it took us quite
a while to figure this out here.....BTW this is for 3.90, but I presume the
same thing works in 3.91.

Rick Sellens                                <[email-masked]>
Mechanical  Engineering                        <[email-masked]>
Queen's University                         <[email-masked]>
Kingston, Ontario, Canada  K7L 3N6  Ph:(613)545-6760 Fax:(613)545-6489

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From: Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 10:07:29 -0700 (PDT)

> Kingston, Ontario, Canada  K7L 3N6  Ph:(613)545-6760 Fax:(613)545-6489

If you're going to be making frequent changes or additions to a shared 
addressbook you probably don't want to actually do it this way.  There is 
logic to detect when the addressbook has changed out from underneath a 
user but it isn't bullet-proof.  That's why global addressbooks are read 
only.  The best way to do this is to move the shared addressbook into 
place every now and then (after a few changes) so that you won't disrupt 
the people using the addressbook.  Suppose you have a shared addressbook 
called "/usr/local/lib/abook".  You might do this:

Somehow create addressbook /usr/local/lib/abook.new and 
/usr/local/lib/abook.new.lu.  One way to do this would be to copy 
somebody's addressbook to abook.new and then run pine with that as the 
addressbook (pine -address-book=/usr/local/lib/abook.new) and open up the 
addressbook to look at it.  A fancier way is to use the create_lu command 
line flag.  Now move it into place:

% cd /usr/local/lib
% mv abook abook.old
% mv abook.lu abook.old.lu
% mv abook.new abook
% mv abook.new.lu abook.lu

By doing it this way, the people who have abook and abook.lu open will 
continue to use those (since the inode didn't change) and the new people 
will get the new one and not have to build the .lu file.

If there are only a few people and things don't change much you can try 
to share a writable address book, and it should work ok.  You will 
occasionally get the "re-syncing addressbook" messages and may sometimes 
get changes aborted if somebody else also changed it.  And, if you are 
still using 3.90 instead of 3.91 you should get 3.91.  There are some bad 
addressbook bugs in 3.90 that can destroy addressbook data.

Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Washington, Seattle