Nancy McGough writes on 15 March 1996 at 09:31:38
On Fri, 15 Mar 1996, Doug Hughes wrote:
Why not make the book about procmail, IMAP and POP?
filters, gateways and clients, oh my! :)
I actually think it makes more sense to write a short,
quick (I hope) book focusing on procmail, but I'm
curious to hear what other people think.
I'm not sure I'd buy a short focused procmail book - I can get most of
what I need from the man-pages and other such things.
I think that this is true. But O'Rielly has begun to write books that
really are not necessary (I will take things like the sendmail book was
necessary. But are things like the bash book really needed? the Linux
stuff with the fabulous linux documentation project (and I say this as a
heathen FreeBSD user!)?
However, a book that goes into detail about all things at the MUA
level might be interesting. By "MUA level" I mean not sendmail (MTA,
and there is already a book on that) and not MIME/PGP/PEM which
concern themselves with the contents of a message.
Well, I have no idea what you mean. What do you mean by the MUA
level? I think that you mean MDA. (And I do not think that this is
really a satisfactory distinction because things like POP/IMAP and
procmail do not really fit in nicely) (unless you want to call them an
extension of the delivery agents).
That said, I think that the idea of something addressing that weird
ground would be very good. AS there are more users on machines the use
of IMAP and POP is increasing (because NFS just cannot cut it. And it
really should not have to try) I imagine that the more clueless people
running things like ISP's are really going to get screwed. But... (and
no offense to Nancy intended) is Nancy the person to do that? I think
that procmail just isn't big enough to be a book. what things do people
have trouble with? the syntax. regex. shell scripting issues.. what
else? Logic..
So how about a lot of really good examples that show a lot of things in
the distributions rather than a book (that is going to be too expensive :)
How about encouraging people to read the manpages! They are excellent as
far as manpages go. I think that a faq is about right (and it would
be done if my work was not more than full time right now).
Ssoren