Re: Yarn and GUI news/mail

From: Frank G. Pitt (frankie@mundens.gen.nz)
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 07:16:44 +1200

In article <ikyc10E6AxbR092yn@momeraths.org>,
MarchHare@momeraths.org (Sysop John) wrote:
>
>Yes, I've looked at some. A _couple_ have come close. However, I'm
>still using Yarn. If it were easier to have it put files exactly where
>I want to and still be avaible for more than one user, and if the
>news database weren't so easily corrupted, I probably would never look
>at another one. Mind you, these are pretty minor bugs.

Just an addenda here, the major reason I'm thinking of writing my own
(GUI?) version of Yarn is because it's not truly multi-user capable.

Yes, you can have multiple users, but it's not multi-user aware at
runtime. If you have two users, or even two copies running off the same
user, you get outgoing mail/news loss, and corruption to various parts
of the system.

What I often want to be able to do is, while editing, go and look at
another article or email. That's what a GUI gets you.

As stated, it is unsafe running multiple copies of Yarn, so I have
disabled the capability. My normal MO now is to edit any reply
in GUI text editor, allowing me to look at any mail or posts I wish
to while doing so, and then to paste that reply into the Yarn window

The filter program that comes with yarn is also extremely crappy, as
it can't match more than one rule ay a time. (so if you have a letter
addressed to two local users, it only get to the one whose rule appears
first) But that part is easily fixed.

A more annoying flaw (IMO) is that it dosen't handle local mail
locally, you have to send local mail up to your SMTP host and back
again to get it delivered.

The non-multi-user capability is a fundamental flaw caused by lack of
of proper (if any) semaphoring on common files.

My current intentions are to write a sort of NNTP/POP3/SMTP capable server
that merely uses the YARN database format for storage, that way, only
the one process will ever have access to the shared files, and access
speed will be far faster as he indexes only need to be read on server
start-up. People will then be able to use whatever front end they like.
(though obviously, a YARN like text mode front end would probably
be preferable)

I'd like to do the whole thing in raw Java, so that it's automatically
portable

Of course, that all depends on getting time to do all that :-)
I've only written a couple of command line utilities so far.

-- 
Frankie


Frank G. Pitt | When in doubt, wash | fun:   frankie@mundens.gen.nz
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