2010-12-08



Again I had been too lazy -- or too busy -- to document  my  com-
puter life.

Yes, I had been busy and productive in the last days.  Here is  a
summary:


One asked how he can redirect program output to a different  ter-
minal, maybe even to another user.  Here the great design of Unix
shows up again:

     date | write bob
(It assumes `mesg y' is set by bob.)

Saying ``Hello'' to oneself is easy:

     echo Hello

But one can do it more tricky too:

     echo Hello >`tty`

Understood?



Then I worked a lot on masqmail in order to finish up some  parts
I  had  been  reworking  or  checking,  and  in  order to prepare
masqmail for the long-awaited 0.3.1 release.

Masqmail improved a lot on the quality and concept  side  in  the
last time.

I added a gmane group for masqmail's mailing list to  become  the
official archive for the list.  [0]

I also took a step back and regarded masqmail's concepts in  gen-
eral.   My  aim  is  to  make the concepts and thus the code more
clear, simple, general. I like to remove corner-cases,  branches,
options  in  order  to  have a more robust, correct and easier to
understand piece of software.

Of course we inherit sendmail and thus need  to  deal  with  some
ugly  parts.   We  incorporate  several  tasks in one program ...
well.  The mode of operation are even not  definded  clearly  and
visibly.  Some are entered with -bX (variable X), -qXXX is a mode
but -q (without argument) not, -MXXX is a mode too, etc.  I  can-
not change this because we need to stay compatible but at least I
now made the modes more explicite and documented them visibly.

A larger redesign in the route concept is still to come.   I  al-
ready  have  plans.  Unfortunately  time is running out.  On 19th
I'll leave again and will be offline for three month then.



This time offline is also really annoying in regard to nmh.   Now
I  am  well in the code and my patch is getting to the last steps
before it (or a modified version) reaches the code.  But  I  have
to leave.

I don't care so much for my work on nmh as I achieved  enough  in
my  time  here, but now is a time of change in nmh, at least some
people are talking of change while others don't.  This  would  be
exactly  the  right  time to fork.  I have plans and I do want to
spend time ... but now it is not possible for me, because of real
life.   Hence, it needs to wait until April.  Sadly, because it's
all different if you are at the right place at  the  right  time.
Now it would be, I think.  But maybe I'm wrong.

In any way, although I have to leave the computer world  at  this
point, a great time in real life is about to start.  It's like in
``The Neverending Story'': I'll return to Fantasia. :-)


But hey, I still have about a week ... let's get it on!



P.S.  Free  Software  is  about  communities.   What  I  miss  in
masqmail, I do have too much in nmh.

[0]  http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.mail.masqmail


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>