Subject: addressbook_lu behaviour?

From: Fuzzy <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 17:00:14 -0500 (EST)

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I created a system wide addressbook and its lu by
creating it as a .addressbook, then copying both
to /usr/local/lib and seting it as a system address
book in /usr/local/lib/pine.conf. with the older
pine I did forced-abook entries, but a system
address book looked like a better way to provide
the addresses for system related functions.

pine finds the address book correctly, but
says its using a temporary lu for that addressbook
because it cannot write to the system addressbook.

I'd like to not get that message, (that's why
the lu file is in /usr/local/lib). I'm concerned
our users will be confused by it.

what can I do to not get that error?

Pine 4.44
FreeBSD 4.4

thanks.

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From: Gopi Sundaram <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 16:23:19 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Fuzzy wrote:

> pine finds the address book correctly, but says its using a temporary
> lu for that addressbook because it cannot write to the system
> addressbook.
<snip>
> what can I do to not get that error?

Hmm, I've never done this, but here's a wild guess:

Try running Pine as root, and access the global addressbook. It should
generate the lookup file. Then, quit, and change the permissions so that
everyone can access the lu file.

I guess the disadvanage would be that you would have to repeat that
every time you changed the global addressbook.

Try that and reply here if it works.

-- 
Gopi Sundaram
[email-masked]
http://www.cse.sc.edu/~gopalan/Pine/

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From: Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 09:01:39 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

Running as root as Gopi suggests should work (assuming root has write
permission in the directory). Here are a couple paragraphs with more
information from the pine technical notes.

Address Book Lookup File
Starting in 3.90 there is an additional file for each address book, called
the LookUp file. It usually has the same name as the address book file
with the suffix ".lu" appended. (It might have a different name if a file
name length restriction prohibited that name.) This file is created and
maintained by Pine. If it is deleted, Pine will recreate it next time it
runs. Its purpose is to speed up lookups for large address books and to
reduce memory requirements for large address books. A fairly detailed
description of how it is used is given in src/pine/adrbklib.h.

The lookup file changes whenever the address book itself is changed. If it
doesn't exist, Pine attempts to create it. If Pine doesn't have permission
to create the lookup file with the standard name, it will create a
temporary version in a temp directory. You want to avoid this since it
would have to be rebuilt every time Pine was run, and rebuilding takes a
significant time for a large address book. So, if you're going to have a
shared address book in a read-only directory, it is highly desirable to
create the lookup file so that the users sharing it won't have to each
create a copy in a temp directory. You can do that by running Pine and
accessing the address book under a user id which does have permission to
write the file or by using the -create_lu command line argument to Pine.
If users may be using a shared address book that needs updating, it is
best to move the old address book to another name rather than copying over
it since the file may be opened by running Pines. It is also best to make
the lookup file for the new addrbook before moving it and the address book
file into place, otherwise users may get stuck attempting to initialize
the new lookup file. The lookup file contains a timestamp which records
the mtime of the address book file when the lookup file was last updated.
Whenever a user runs Pine the current mtime of the address book is checked
against this timestamp and if they differ, Pine will want to rebuild the
lookup file. Because of this, it isn't a good idea to build the lookup
file and then copy the address book and lookup file into place. You should
move it or copy it in some way which preserves the address book file's
mtime (e.g., use mv or tar).

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