On 11 September 2000 at 15:01, "Dan Harkless" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> multiple users sharing a single nmh folder (with unique sequences) has to be
> a pretty darn rare situation
IMO, it's rare because people these days don't think of being able to
do it; they're used to GUI mail front-ends that don't allow (?) this
kind of thing. For instance, I've done that in two different companies
where I worked in groups that used MH for bug tracking and etc. We'd
have central folder(s) of bug reports that everyone accessed (and had
their own current message, sequences of messages they were working on,
etc.). We could use "anno" to make annotations that everyone could see
(like assigning a bug and tracking its state). We could use the "mark"
command to maintain our own sequences (by priority, "do today", etc.).
"pick" was great for searching bugs and finding out who was working on
which bugs. We had a central "bin" directory of scripts to make this
easier -- and, of course, individual workers could write their own
scripts. A central maintainer actually owned the bug folders, inc'ed
new reports into them, refiled messages into archive folders when a bug
was fixed, and so on. (Directory modes were set so only the maintainer
could move messages out of the folders, but group-write file permissions
let everyone in the group make annotations on the messages.) Etc. etc.
Sure, there are more sophisticated bug tracking systems that do a lot
more, but that's not my point. The point is that the flexibility in
nmh makes seamless integration between "email apps" and "other apps"
easy to do. In GUI environments -- especially ones that glop all the
messages into a single file -- this sort of integration is a lot harder.
This is why I'm writing my tomes ;-) about not losing nmh flexibility
with IMAP, wherever it's reasonable to keep it.
Jerry
--
Jerry Peek, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.jpeek.com/
