Subject: Re: info on EXTRADRIVERS=mbox

From: Joe Brennan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 96 22:00:34 EDT

> Where can I get further information on building PINE with the mbox driver?
> PINE behaves in an peculiar manner:

Interesting question, because we have a "small" spool disk and a
"large" array for home directories, so we want to use mbox.

You've described the way the drivers work.  Note that the order of
appearance in the makefile determines the order in which Pine tries
them; the first one that works gets used.  The mbox driver gets called
on the condition that there is an mbox file.  If so, Pine uses it and
moves new mail into it by itself, as you describe.  If there is no
mbox, Pine moves on to the next driver in the list.

Pine is essentially anti-mbox and the driver seems to be no more than
a concession to users who happen to have an mbox already.  As soon as
the mbox is empty, Pine reverts to its tendency to keep mail in spool.

You might be tempted to do "touch mbox" at login, or in a pine
shellscript wrapper, but it's not good enough!  You will also need to
modify one of the source files to make it accept a zero-length mbox
as "valid".

Joseph Brennan  Postmaster  Academic Information Systems
                Columbia University in the City of New York
                [email-masked]