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Re: 233 MHz CPU system - Debian and SO 5.2 question



On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 06:04:19PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
| On Sun, 24 Feb 2002 15:53:16 -0500 dman <dsh8290@rit.edu> wrote:
| > On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 02:26:58AM -0800, ben wrote:
| > | On Saturday 23 February 2002 06:53 pm, Bob Underwood wrote:
| > | [snip]
| > | > >
| > | > > | Is the Star Office 5.2 address book reliable enough for mail merges, or
| > | > > | has any other word processor (Applixware?) an address book that can be
| > | > > | used for mail merges?
| [snip]
| > 
| > Is a "mail merge" an operation by which a form letter is filled in
| > with values from a database?  If so, the reason such an app is not
| > readily apparent is because it is rather easy to script such a thing.
| exactly...
| 
| [snip example]
| > I'm sure someone more familiar with sh/sed/awk could do it with those
| > tools.  The point is that with text-based markup like LaTeX or groff
| > or DocBook, it is quite easy to come up with a tag system of your own
| > and a script to fill in the fields from a DB of your choosing.  This
| > could be extended to grab the data from a SQL database or an XML file
| > or whatever you want.  Certainly this script is not robust -- it
| > assumes the input is valid.  The UNIX philosophy is to Do One Thing
| > and Do It Well.  As a user you plug the tools together to get your
| > work done.  Databases already exist.  Typesetting tools already exist.
| > Plug them together for yourself.
| 
| But then then The Average User would have to learn the tools (read: 
| programming languages).  It's been an end-user operation for 20 years 
| (going back to WordStar 2.x) even on a nerdy OS like CP/M.  
| 
| Remember, The Average User doesn't care about The Unix Way, but
| just wants a system that doesn't crash, get infected with virii,
| and make him/her learn a lot of "hard" stuff.  In this case, all
| the man wants is a pre-written system that lets him combine his 
| form letter with his (probably flat-file) mailing list. 

So go ahead and build a system for Average Users to use.  You can make
millions ... ;-).  Then again, maybe not since no one has found it
necessary so far (or has found it so trivial that they didn't feel the
need to publish it).  As I said, I wasn't trying to convince anyone
that such a tool is useless, but rather that it can fairly easily be
built now using existing tools.

-D

-- 

A)bort, R)etry, B)ang it with a large hammer



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