Subject: Welcome to the faces mailing list.

From: richb@stard (Rich Burridge)
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1991 12:29:18 +1000

This is the introductory message for the faces mailing list.

As you probably already know...

Faces is a program for monitoring a list visually. Typically this is a list
of incoming mail messages, jobs in the print queue or users on a system.
Faces has the ability to read compressed faces images embedded in your
mail headers, uncompressing them and displaying them on-the-fly. There are
graphical interfaces for X11, XView, SunView and NeWS.

This mailing list is to:

  - generate new patches for faces with a faster turnaround then is generally
    appreciated on the net.

  - check that faces is portable, and correctly runs on a variety on Unix
    machines.

  - solicit help from other people in fixing the bugs, and implementing the
    suggestions for enhancements that are listed in the TODO file.

  - promote discussion on faces; suggestions on how to implement new features,
    tricks used in running faces or in setting it up. To actively share faces
    expertise.

------

The address of the mailing list is:

   [email-masked]

This should be equivalent to:

   [email-masked]

but the first address is prefered, and should be much faster.

Should you have any administrative problems with the mailing list, then the
proper address to send them to is:

   [email-masked]    -or-    [email-masked]

although mailing them direct to me will probably work.

I've also set it up so that messages sent to the mailing list are archived.
How to make those archives subsequently available is another question, which
I'll deal with at a later date (when there is sufficient material archived).

There are currently seventeen names on the alias, plus one exploder, plus the
archive entry.

---------

As a start to finding out exactly where faces is currently at, I've just gone
through my faces mail folder, and added in all the bugs, suggestions, fixes
and enhancements I'd received, which weren't already in the TODO file. These
are listed below, and will be officially included with the TODO file in the
next patch.

If your favorite problem/suggestion isn't on this list, please let me know
and I'll add it. Apologies if I've inadvertently omitted any. The TODO file
is now almost double the size.

---------

I will be going overseas for seven weeks on April 7th. Before then I'd like
to get out one more patch. I'd also like to allow two or three days after
that, just in case I have to send out a fixup patch for anything I may have
broken in that patch.

Rich Burridge,          DOMAIN: [email-masked]
Sun Microsystems.       ACSNET: [email-masked]
PHONE: +61 2 911 4212   UUCP:   {uunet,mcvax,ukc}!munnari!sunaus.oz!richb

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

New TODO entries:

*   From John Buckle <[email-masked]>
    With faces v1.4, I've been having trouble in sorting out my faces
    directory path. On the old version (v1.3) I used -f .faces, this meant
    that my directory was searched last which also meant that my misc. face
    was used.  Using FACEPATH I haven't been able to do this, it either seems
    to use one directory or the other, but not both.
    
    	FACEPATH=:.faces	- uses /n/faces/misc. for things stored .faces

    	FACEPATH=.faces:	- uses my misc. for things in /n/face

    Further comment from John Mackin <[email-masked]>
    This effectively means that under 1.4, you cannot have your own
    misc./unknown icons. The first directory in the FACEPATH to contain a
    misc./unknown icon will be the last directory searched; any directories
    after that will be silently ignored. An unfortunate sude-effect of the
    make_iconname() routine.

*   From Amir J. Katz <[email-masked]>
    I think that it should be mentioned in the faces man page that every
    xterm started under X will show on 'xfaces -h localhost' as a new user,
    unless you start xterm with the '-ut' option. I know it's an RTFM issue
    but xterm man page is so looooong, so I am sure most people fall asleep
    long before they reach the '-ut' option...

*   From Lindsay F. Marshall <[email-masked]>
    With the X11 version under twm, there is a notitle white line problem.
    Also seen under Open Windows. This shows up as a thick white line along
    the bottom of my faces window. The white bar at the bottom is exactly
    twm title sized......

*   From Lindsay F. Marshall <[email-masked]>
    The button1clear bug is weird - you click button1, nothing happens
    until you click button two!!

*   From Eric Negaard <[email-masked]>
    I have been working on a user program for use with faces (to display
    mail in a POP mailbox) and I noticed what I think is a bug.  The code
    in do_prog does not update the icon image, so the faces icon always
    displays the NOMAIL icon.

    My fix was to change the

      add_face(DISP_BOTH, ...)

    to

      add_face(DISP_ALL, ...).

*   From John B. Melby <[email-masked]>
    If one creates a directory "edu" in the faces directory, it does not
    have any effect on a domain address in which EDU is capitalized.
    It seems to me that "faces" should not pay any attention to the case
    of a domain name (since case is only supposed to be significant in the
    user name).

    From John Mackin <[email-masked]>
    The comparison when looking up the domain in the faces
    directory appears to be case-sensitive.  This is wrong per
    RFC822, domain-parts are case-insensitive.  Both the directory
    name and the host name from the mail item should be downcased
    before comparison.

    From Peter Gray <[email-masked]>
    When comparing the domain of the mail with the machine.tab entries
    strcasecmp should be used since mail addresses are case invarient.

*   From John Mackin <[email-masked]>
    If you have a machine.tab entry in an earlier directory in
    FACEPATH instead of a symlink, further directories down the
    FACEPATH are not searched.

*   From John Mackin <[email-masked]>
    With faces v1.4.13, I am having a repeatable problem with faces starting
    up with the window being all white. Then if I give it a toggle button
    (e.g.) it draws what it should contain.

*   From Mike Bolotski <[email-masked]>
    We've made (and are planning to make more) changes to the faces package.

    Some changes:

    - add flag to allow faces to be compiled to always run -U.

    - added EXCLUDE_UPDATE_DOMAIN so that mail from local users does not
      result in continuous updates

    - fixed icon2ikon to understand the icon format as output by the PBM
      package (no leading 0x)

    - fixed icon2ikon to extract the center 48 pixels instead of just the top
      48.

    Planned changes:

    - change the basic data structure to either a hash table or a balanced
      tree

    - automatic clearing of old faces once the mail has been read (does
      that exist already?)

    - hooks to emacs (RMAIL and VM) to allow automatic X-Face inclusion)

    - lots more, since several students at the AI Lab are fascinated
      by the package.

*   Include mention of Steve Kinzlers' anon ftp service for the faces database
    in the README file.

*   Mention the faces mailing list in the README file.

*   Include Steve Kinzlers' scripts and filters in the generic faces
    distribution. These include:

    ikon2xbm, xbm2ikon      bitmaps filters for Blit ikon and X11 bitmaps

    lpqall.sh, lpqall       customized "faces -e" script for monitoring all
                            printers

    mailq                   customized "faces -e" script for monitoring the
                            system sendmail queue

*   From Philip Gladstone <[email-masked]>
    In the top level Makefile, you allow specification of FMONTYPE.
    The code in main.c checks for FBMONTYPE. Also the definition of
    FMONTYPE=0 and =1 are reversed.

*   From Jim Rees <[email-masked]>
    It would be nice if the compression and uncompression routines were
    separated into different source files, so that if I want to include just
    the uncompression in my mailer, I don't have to include the compression
    stuff too.

*   From Ian Darwin <[email-masked]>
    Need to do a version of faces for tNt v2.0.

*   Better handling of the number of characters to use for display the text on
    the faces icons, especially with variable width fonts.

*   From Chris Steinbroner <[email-masked]>
    From Philip Colmer <[email-masked]>
    Loading xfaces fails because XSetWMProtocols() does not exist on my system.
    It's an X11R4 routine.

*   From Sam Drake <[email-masked]>
    Set of diffs to get the X11 version of faces working on the
    RISC System/6000 under AIX 3.1.  Both mail and logon monitoring
    work; I haven't tried print queue monitoring yet.

*   From Michael Schmidt <[email-masked]>
    With NIS (YP domain fb17i, mail domain uni-paderborn.de) I want to put
    a line "fb17i=uni-paderborn.de" in the machine.tab, so that for all
    hosts in the YP domain faces are looked up under their mail domain.
    [Set of diffs included].

*   From Ken Wood <[email-masked]>
    Details of how to generate X-Face: headers from within GNU Emacs. Needs
    to be added to the README file.

*   From Lindsay F. Marshall <[email-masked]>
    Would it be possible to have a define (or option) that allowed us to
    set the X title/name attributes. I want the program to be called "Faces"
    in my twm iconManager and it is currently called "faces". I haven't
    found any way of changing it other than by hacking the code.

*   From Lindsay F. Marshall <[email-masked]>
    Some suggestions:

    - people.tab/machine.tab per face database

    - caching of icons to reduce file accesses

    - re-reading people.tab/machine.tab when modified

    - access to gnu finger (face) service

THE END.