Re: freedomization task list [was: Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL]
On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 10:57:15PM -0700, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > Will most PICO users really care about the size of the program very
> > much? Given the big memories of modern machines, I would expect that
> > the size won't make a practical difference any more--assuming the
> > commands and display are similar enough.
I've thought about this issue a bit.
Would it be possible, when reading in the mailbox, to simply scan the
thing for headers-- not keeping the entire mailbox in memory? When someone
wants to read a given message, it would open the message by scanning
forwards to the message, and reading. Or would even this be horribly slow?
It might break compatibility, but I think a really neat feature would be a
library that would allow people reading large files (e.g. mail spools) to
actually start reading -right- at the disk sector that contains what they
want...bypassing traditional file reading operations altogether (e.g. open
the file, scan to where you want, start reading...)... this way, the
program could maintain an index-- okay, message 1 starts at raw address X,
message 2 at raw address Y, and so on. Would this be do-able? It'd be a
nice kluge, certainly, but I'm afraid I know very little ab out how
filesystems work...
>
> For what it's worth, the biggest size issue I've had with pine has to
> do with its handling of a large mailbox. When the mailbox exceeds a
> certain size it takes a number of seconds to switch between browsing
> messages and composing a new message.
>
> As far as pico goes, my Contents-i386.gz from about a month ago doesn't
> mention any bin/pico, and I don't have access to any machines with pico
> on it, and I don't know anyone who uses pico. [So, all my personal
> experience indicates that pine is much more popular than standalone pico.]
In my experience, they're both popular, but yeah, I'd wager that PINE is
more popular than pico.
I have a big deadline coming up on the 10th. After that, I would like to
begin immediate work on PiClone. After that, people can tie it together
with some mailer functions and a Pilot clone to produce a PINE clone. (I'd
call it PINE-Clone, with the logo being a little pine c[l]one :) )
>
> --
> Raul
>
--
= Jon "Caspian" Blank, right-brained computer programmer at large =
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