[3709] in SIPB_Linux_Development
In search of suggestions: two hacks to enhance Athena.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Sat Sep 7 12:24:48 2002
Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2002 12:25:25 -0400
From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: linux-dev@MIT.EDU
At the moment, there are two rough edges to Athena that I'm interested
in smoothing out, but I don't have anyone free to work on them. My
purpose in writing this is to tap the talent pool and see if someone
knows of a tool that fits the bill already, or is interested in doing
the work.
I am interested in:
----
1. A tool to switch between wired and wireless operation.
On my old RH 6.0 Sony Viao, I would run control-panel, then run the
network config tool, and then click to choose which ever eth device
corresponded to wired and wireless operation (it was always interesting
to see which one landed on eth0 this time around.)
I see that nowadays Red Hat says, "Use linuxconf", but at the present
moment (and probably for good reason) neither linuxconf, nor
control-panel are installed on Athena.
Ideally there should be something that someone withOUT a lot of clue
could use to say, "Use the wireless card now", and "Use the wired line
now". If windows can do this in a couple mouse clicks (and it does)
then damn it, so should Athena Linux. I think the real problem is that
the various engineers have individually decided that the system they're
familiar with:
control-panel/network
linuxconf
cardctl scheme
sysconfig/network
is the one true way. Unfortunately, if you sit down and watch someone
who uses Athena Linux just fine, and then try and get them to use the
present interfaces to JUST switch networking between wired and wireless,
you see that the interfaces are ALL for sysadmins, not users.
----
2. Tool to replicate IMAP hierarchy in AFS/UFS.
I don't know about you, but I'm still nervous about putting my email
archives in IMAP. They've spanned 3 email infrastructures as it is, and
I use them actively. I would feel a LOT more comfortable if there were
an easy way to say, "back up my IMAP hierarchy into the directory X",
and then, if I spazzed and blew away a message or folder, to restore
that message or folder into my IMAP hierarchy.
Part of the problem is that there is no clear consensus on email archive
formats. The ONLY reason why I find myself preferring mh format for
same is that each message is in its own file, and so I can use existing
file tools to find the message I seek and to grab hold of it. I've used
file utilities to fool Evolution into getting hold of a mail message
that was once a file, and restoring it into my IMAP, mh, or Evolution
local archives.
This means that I can already use Evolution for the restore operation.
(I could probably use Pine or, god forbid, mh as well.) But neither
Evolution nor pine, nor mh will create folders and sub folders in an mh
hierarchy automatically.
What kind of rsync for IMAP could be created?
Thoughts?
Ideas?
Tropical fish?
-wdc
