Subject: Need help modifying folder driver to read compressed folders

From: Ken Mayer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 16:22:52 -0400 (EDT)

I posted the following to comp.mail.pine:

>I was wondering how difficult would it be to extend pine to be able to 
>read compressed mail folders? I have a lot mail that I need to keep around, 
>but rarely read. It would be great if I could gzip them down and when I 
>needed to, pine would automatically gunzip them for me.

And I got the following reply:

>From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
>Subject: Re: Reading compressed files
>Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 13:27:03 -0700 (PDT)
>Organization: University of Washington
>
>It should be reasonably easy to add a compressed folder driver to Pine
>(c-client actually), perhaps as little as a few dozen lines of code.  
>Contact [email-masked] if you would like some pointers 
>getting started... 

So here I am writing to you for a starting point to add a hook to the
folder driver so Pine will read (*.Z, *.gz, *.zip, *.z, etc.) files on the
fly. I figure that a nice generic approach is a set of regexp/command
pairs in .pinerc (at least it's a start). 

Your help is appreciated.

Regards,
Ken Mayer

--
Ken Mayer
MRJ, Inc.	 			(703) 385-0722
10455 White Granite Drive		(703) 385-4637 fax
Oakton, Virginia 22124			[email-masked]
USA			"OOP S&M: Drag me. Drop me. Treat me like an object."

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 13:30:34 -0700 (PDT)

Ken -

     We at UW are now discussing the possibility of supporting compressed mail
folders in c-client now.  I don't believe we can use .pinerc if the support
for compression is in c-client, since there are other applications which use
c-client besides Pine.  I imagine that we'll be implementing support for this
sometime in the next few months.

     If you'd like to go it alone without waiting for us, you probably want to
write a driver which recognizes compressed files in the driver's valid method,
and then in its open method uncompresses and does a new driver search and open
(much as the dummy driver does with empty folders that become non-empty).  If
you need to recompress, then instead of switching drivers midstream you'll
probably want to open a subordinate mail stream so that you can catch the
close method and recompress.

-- Mark --