mhonarc-users

Re: Web Conferencing

1995-12-27 16:22:35
I have listed MHonArc on a survey I have done of Web-based conferencing
systems. I know MHonArc isn't really a conferencing system, but it's pretty
close. I know some people have used HyperMail for Web conferencing. I
haven't seen it done with MHonArc but from the description at your Web site
it sounds like it could be. 

It can in the same way as HyperMail does.  I do not know of any
specific examples off-hand, but I have receive mail from users on
the topic.


Anyway, I would appreciate any corrections, suggestions, or comments you
might have about my survey. See
http://freenet.msp.mn.us/people/drwool/webconf.html

I'm unsure if I can help out here.  I have not done any investigations
on web conferencing systems.  I'll try to give it a read.


Also, I'm quite familiar with HyperMail but not with MHonArc. Any comments
on how the two compare?

The differences are mostly featured based.  MHonArc provides
the following features that HyperMail doesn't:

        o MIME support.  There are people who explicitly request this
          feature in mail->html converters.  Because of the way
          mhonarc deals with MIME, users can customize the message
          filtering process as they see fit.

        o User customization.  Hypermail does not give much in customizing
          the appearence of indexes and messages.  Mhonarc gives alot
          of user control on appearance.

        o UUCP mail box and MH mail folder support.  I'm a big MH user
          and MH support is crucial to me (and it was the key reason
          I decided to write my own mail->html filter).  Also, mhonarc
          is able to work with several MUA's (MH, mail, Elm, Pine, Eudora,
          etc).  Hypermail only supports UUCP mail box format.

        o MS-DOS support.  This is important to people who have
          Windows/MS-DOS systems and want to archive mail.

        o Mail archive updating w/o having the original messages.

        o Archive locking to allow messages to be added as they
          arrive.

HyperMail provides the following features that MHonArc doesn't:

        o Various muliple indices.  MHonArc only provides up to
          2 indices: one is thread; the other is date, subject,
          or as-processed.  Hypermail always provides date, author,
          subject, and thread.

          It is unclear which is better.

        o Other?

If I'm not mistaken, threading is done differently between the two.
MHonArc relies entirely on messages contain referenced message ids to
perform threading.  This form of threading works well with news based
archives since most new software supports the References field.  As for
mail, it is less successful since many MUA's still do not support
in-reply-to or references fields (or users are unaware on how to
configure their MUA to do it).  I'm unclear on Hypermail's way of
threading, but it may do some subject based detection.

Another thing to note is that mhonarc is written in perl and hypermail
is in C (or Lisp).  Depending on your needs, perl can be an advantage
over C, and vice-versa.

An example of what can be done with mhonarc can be seen at
<URL:http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/mhonarc/>.
Achim Bohnet has set up an archive that uses mhonarc, but has hooked in
a search engine and his own higher level organizational structure
beyond what mhonarc provides.

        --ewh

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