On 8/30/07, M. Fioretti <mfioretti(_at_)nexaima(_dot_)net> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 16:24:15 PM -0700, Bart Schaefer
(barton(_dot_)schaefer(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com) wrote:
If you had a background in the
original unix programming philosophy, you would not be surprised
I do have that background, even if I have never done heavy mailbox
processing before: "everything is a file", use pipes, redirect STDIN
and STDOUT, etc...
The important part of the philosophy that you didn't mention is having
small programs that do only one thing, but do it well. Formail reads,
and extracts messages from, flat-file mailboxes; that's its one thing.
There are already plenty of other programs (including the shell
itself) that can handle files stored in a directory structure.
For the same reason I know very well that there are thousands of
wrappers for every conceivable purpose. Therefore, since maildir
didn't appear out of the blue yesterday, I simply gave for granted
that formail could wrap itself in that mode
It didn't appear yesterday, but the day it did appear was still
several years after the day formail (and procmail) appeared. If
they'd been closer together procmail probably would not have a
critcally important variable named MAILDIR that has nothing to do with
the maildir storage format.
(I remember using procmail when it didn't even know how to write MH
directory format. "Twelve dollars? Why, when I was your age, I
coulda got that SAME shirt for a NICKLE.")
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