Subject: Re: Enabling the mbox driver

From: Joe Brennan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 96 9:54:17 EDT

Mark Crispin wrote,
> mail.txt is the native and natural format of MM.

Not really.  There are various MMs but Columbia MM can do both mbox and
mail.txt, and we're using mbox format here for the mbox file.  Pine
and MM are fairly compatible if you have Pine using the mbox driver;
the main difference is how they flag messages, e.g. marking what was
seen.  Remind people to kill MM before running Pine in the same
session, or a suspended MM will yell about the file changing out from
under it, and save its version too.

The mbox driver is included in the c-client package, but is not used in the
Makefile.  Make a change something like this in Makefile:

from:
DEFAULTDRIVERS=imap nntp pop3 mh tenex mtx mmdf bezerk news phile dummy

to:
DEFAULTDRIVERS=tenex mh mbox imap bezerk nntp mtx news mmdf phile dummy

You have to get the mbox driver ahead of imap so it tries it first.
The mbox driver will be used if there is a non-empty mbox file in the
account.  If there is no mbox or an empty mbox, it will skip to the
next driver, e.g. imap.

To force use of mbox for people who only use Pine, you'd need to do 2
things.  First, bezerk.c has to accept an empty mbox as valid:

bezerk.c 141
<     if (!sbuf.st_size)errno = 0;/* empty file */
---
>     if (!sbuf.st_size) {
>       errno = 0;/* empty file */
>       ret = T;
>     }

Second, you'd have to touch mbox as Pine starts.  Shell wrapper?

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