🚀 go-pugleaf

Don't you just hate it when a package has a new update every few days?  ...as
if system administration isn't hectic enough...  After only six days of public
release, the response to the popclient package has been astounding -- thanks
to everyone that mailed in praise, complaints, bug reports, dirty jokes about
the POP acronym, etc.  The suggestions and minor bug reports have culminated 
in the 2.20 release.

The following things have been added/fixed in the 2.20 release (which 
follows the 2.1a release):

o	In pop3.c, what should have been an fprintf() call, slipped through 
        as an fputs() call.  This actually fixed in a 2.1b release that wasn't
	widely announced.
	
o	Now INADDR_NONE is defined in socket.h if it wasn't defined by one
	of the system header files (as it should be).  Thanks to Scott
	Harper <harper@suny.stat.vt.edu> for pointing out this problem (which 
        seems particular to SunOS) back in the 2.1 release 

o	Now the getpass() call in popclient.c has an appropriate typecast
	to eliminate that pesky gcc warning message.

o	To finesse the problem of coming up with a portable means of locking
	the system mail folder (in the absence of the -c or -o option), direct
	writes to mail spool have been eliminated in favor of piping the 
	received messages through /bin/mail (or an equivalent MDA), just as
	sendmail does for local delivery.  A file 'config.h' has been added
	in to allow the path and arguments for the MDA to be specified by 
	the installer.  The change to MDA-based delivery obviates the need for
	MAIL enviroment variable support.  Special thanks go to Tor Lillqvist
	<tml@tik.vtt.fi> for suggesting the change to MDA-based delivery.

o	At the suggestion of Mitch Wright <mitch@corp.cirrus.com> a #define
	has been added to config.h so that the installer can select the 
	default protocol, POP2 or POP3.

o	For older (K&R) compilers, you may specify CFLAGS=-DNO_PROTO to turn
	off function prototypes.


The 2.20 release is available via anonymous ftp from csugrad.cs.vt.edu as
/pub/popclient-2.20.tar.gz.

To my knowledge, this version should compile cleanly and run nicely on

	Ultrix 4.2A, 4.3, 4.3A
	DEC/OSF1 1.x, 2.x
	SunOS 4.x  (thanks to Scott and Mitch)
	AIX 3.2.x
	Linux 0.9, 1.0
	NetBSD 0.9

I still haven't seen/heard about a Solaris port, but it should go fairly
smoothly.  If someone has done (or will do) this, please let me know.


On the wish list for the 2.3 release:

o	An /etc/popserver file to allow the system administrator to specify
	the default POP server and protocol, and a POPSERVER environment
	variable to allow users to specify their own default.

o	A .poprc file somewhat analogous to the ftp .netrc file, which would 
	contain one line entries with a server name, protocol, user id, and
	optional password.
	
o	Overall cleanup of error message handling, and inclusion of hostname
	lookup failure messages.

--
Carl Harris
CSUGRAD Administrator
ceharris@vt.edu
http://csugrad.cs.vt.edu/aboutus/ceharris.html