Path: seismo!harvard!talcott!panda!sources-request
From: sources-request@panda.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.sources
Subject: The Msg Mail System Intro (+ moderators notes)
Message-ID: <1456@panda.UUCP>
Date: 1 Mar 86 17:56:46 GMT
Sender: jpn@panda.UUCP
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Approved: jpn@panda.UUCP

Mod.sources:  Volume 4, Issue 4
Submitted by: hplabs!hpcnou!dat (Dave Taylor)


Following this message will be SEVEN 'shar' files containing the source to 
the MSG mail system.

MSG is a screen-oriented mail system for Bell and Berkeley systems and
replaces "mailx" and "mail" (and "mh", but that's a different story).
It self-configures on mail transports and currently supports both 'sendmail'
and 'rmail', according to which is available.

It also uses the pathalias database, if available on the local machine.

[       - a few notes from the moderator

    I was able to compile this system for Berkeley 4.2 (Actually ULTRIX)
    with a couple of changes to the Makefiles:  "msg" must be linked with
    -lcurses in addition to -ltermcap, the Makefile in the subdirectory "src"
    does not have an appropriate default target (the order in the makefile
    seems to be wrong), and the Makefile in the main directory appears to
    be wrong when it attempts to build the "msg" task in the "src" subdirectory
    (it attempts to make "msg", while the Makefile in "src" only knows about
    "../bin/msg" - the two don't match).  Berkeley users need to add the
    line "DEFINE=-DBSD" to the Makefiles, anyway.

    Also, many Berkeley derived systems may not have the "mm" nroff macro
    package.  The two documents Config.guide and Msg.guide are written using
    mm.  (Our system has the mm macros, but the page numbers formatted
    quite strangely - must be a difference in the System V vs. Berkeley
    nroff's.) If there is sufficient demand, I will post these two documents
    pre-formatted in a later posting.

    Also, I was not able to get utils/fastmail.c to compile properly on
    BSD4.2 (_tzname not found during link), but that seems to be a relatively
    unimportant problem.

    John P. Nelson, Moderator, mod.sources
    (decvax!genrad!panda!jpn  seismo!harvard!talcott!panda!jpn)
]