Re: Anybody working on removing sendmail from base?

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 27 Sep 2003 10:42:29 -0700 (PDT)
Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> :Perhaps in the days before X11 and screen when one instance of the
> shell:was in more or less constant use, this was marginally
> acceptable... but:surely in an asynchronous-friendly OS like
> DragonFlyBSD there should be:a way to be notified right when it
> happens...?  It can't be too hard to:have a background process write
> to the terminal - kind of messy, though.:
> :-Chris
> 
>     'man biff' and 'man comsat'.    These are very, very old utilities
>     and could have security issues (like with escape codes on the
>     terminal screen).  I don't run them myself.

Yeah, I was actually thinking more along the lines of 'screen' when I
trailed off - but I haven't played with it much.  Consider: split the
terminal into two panes, one 24 or so lines, and the other a 1-line
"status bar".  The program running in the status bar pane would display
some pertinent information, say, date/time, how much new mail you have,
disk free space, mbmon stats, whatever.  (One thing I always wanted was
a progress bar for long 'make' jobs...)

That status bar program could poll other programs and reformat their
output to produce its display - but polling is just damned inelegant.
It would be so much nicer for it to be event-oriented somehow - to
receive messages whenever state that it's interested in changes.

Anyway, at this point I'm just rambling.

-Chris