[2941] in Release_7.7_team
Mail client transition plan
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Sep 14 14:11:39 2001
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 14:10:11 -0400
Message-Id: <200109141810.OAA13175@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
I'd like to outline a possible plan for the mail client transition,
assuming we are able to qualify a GUI mail client to replace xmh. For
the purpose of this message I'm going to assume that the new GUI mail
client will be Evolution, but that's just to have a name; the actual
choice isn't written in stone.
The principles I'd like to satisfy are:
(1) Don't force a surprising change on people who use the "Mail"
launcher.
(2) Don't force a surprising change on users of the sipb locker pine
program.
(3) Give people a way to access their old mail.
(4) Don't impose any user-visible complexity in the long run.
Here are my best ideas on how to handle principles (1)-(3), while
keeping principle (4) strongly in mind. People should let me know if
they have better ideas.
(1) The "Mail" launcher
Simply firing up evolution instead of xmh would probably make many
users happy, but would also lead to some support problems, especially
from users who are used to using "inc" and "show" on the dialups. My
idea is that, for existing users, mail-script will pop up a dialog
saying something like:
Athena's default mail client is now Evolution, which will make it
easier to send attachments and which will store your saved mail on
your Post Office server where it can be accessed from Mac and PC
clients as well as from Athena. However, if you prefer, you can
continue to use the old xmh mail program.
If you decide to use Evolution, you should also learn about the
"pine" program to read your mail on the Athena dialups instead of
using the old inc, show, repl, and comp commands.
[Buttons]
Let me try Evolution, but ask me again next time
Let me use xmh for now, but ask me again next time
I want to run Evolution; don't ask me again
I want to keep using xmh; don't ask me again
Show me information about the pine program
(We can use gdialog for this, although there are some grotty diaplay
issues we'd have to put up with or hack around.)
New users should, of course, not get this question, which probably
means that new accounts will need to be created with a flag dotfile
(.athena-evo-noask, or something) as if they had chosen the third menu
option already.
(2) The "pine" program
This is a hard problem, but I think a similar approach to (1) will do
adequately. A front-end script to pine will notice if you already
have a .pinerc, and we will have to have a flag dotfile
(.athena-pine-noask, perhaps) for users of the Athena pine. For users
who have a .pinerc and don't have the flag dotfile, the front end
script will say something like:
The Athena release now contains the Pine program. By default, it
behaves somewhat differently from the SIPB installation of pine you
have probably used in the past; the Athena version stores your saved
mail on your Post Office server where it can be accessed from Mac
and PC clients as well as from Athena. If you prefer, you can
continue to use the SIPB version of pine.
1. Let me try the Athena version of pine, but ask me again next time
2. Let me use the SIPB pine for now, but ask me again next time
3. I want to use the Athena version of pine; don't ask me again
4. I want to keep using the SIPB pine; don't ask me again
If you don't have a .pinerc, of course, the flag dotfile is created
before the real pine program gets run.
(3) Access to old mail
It would be nice if users never had to worry about where their mail
is. I think that's basically impossible during the transition, but we
can try to make it as non-technical as possible by referring to the
old mail store as "Old mail". This means that:
* Evolution needs to be able to access an MH mail store.
* pine will need to be configured to show MH mail as well as pine
mail directories.
* At the same time, because of (4), these things need to only show
up if they already exist. This may be an issue for the MH mail
store because new accounts are created with a .mh_profile and
empty ~/Mail directory. It would be bad for brand new Athena
users to see an "Old mail" folder for all time to come.
