I'm currently defining/programming an interface on MHonArc. I'm also
considering to build an additional 'index on author'. According to the manual
,
this has to be done by the 'OTHERINDEXES' resource. However, I cannot find an
y
further directions in the manual.
Do not know if it more helpful, but have you checked the v2.0
documentation on OTHERINDEXES?
As for "index by author", there is no support for this. You'll
have to modify mhonarc to support author based sorting.
My question: Is there anybody who has experience with building another index
(beside the default date and thread), preferably on author. I would be
grateful if you could supply me with any examples or further information on
how to proceed.
Assuming author sorting exists, you create a resource file describing
the layout of the author index and set the resource(s) to denote
author sorting (which need to be added to mhonarc). For simplicitly,
place the author resource file in the same location as your archive.
Lets say you call it "author.rc". From the main resource file, add
the following:
<otherindexes>
author.rc
</otherindexes>
Also, in your main resource file, you will need to set the various
main, thread, and index resources to add a link to the author index.
The limitation of the otherindexes resource is that you do not get
next/prev resources for messages since otherindexes can define an
arbitrary number of indexes. Also, make sure author.rc always exists
during archive updates. Settings from resource files specified from
otherindexes are not stored in the database file.
If mhonarc was enhanced to support author sorting, a new resource
called AUTHSORT (or something similiar) would be used to set author
based sorting. I could add the functionality myself, by I'm unsure
what is the best way to do the sort. Since there is no standard
for listing an author's human name in mail headers, the information
must be extracted from comments. Also, people tend to put anything in
comments. If sorting by last name is desired, it could be problematic.
The simplist approach is to do a simple alphabetic sort from what is
normally returned from the $FROMNAME$ resource variable. This will
normally cause messages to be sorted by first name.
Comments?
--ewh
