Mercurial > docs > master

comparison ch03.roff @ 19:ab5253e48c74

Find changesets by keywords (author, files, the commit message), revision number or hash, or revset expression.
Wrote about the directory split. style: New macro for env vars.
author markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>
date Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:02:08 +0200
parents db3567c9cc3f
children 7a100c80fa91
comparison
equal deleted inserted replaced
18:db3567c9cc3f 19:ab5253e48c74
289 of moved to the trash folder. 289 of moved to the trash folder.
290 290
291 291
292 .H1 "MH Directory Split 292 .H1 "MH Directory Split
293 .P 293 .P
294 Historically, a personal MH setup had consisted of two things: 294 In MH and nmh, a personal setup had consisted of two parts:
295 the 295 The MH profile, named
296 .Fn \&.mh_profile
297 and being located directly in the user's home directory.
298 And the MH directory, where all his mail messages and also his personal
299 forms, scan formats, other configuration files are stored. The location
300 of this directory could be user-chosen. The default was to name it
301 .Fn Mail
302 and have it directly in the home directory.
303 .P
304 I've never liked the data storage and the configuration to be intermixed.
305 They are different kinds of data. One part, are the messages,
306 which are the data to operate on. The other part, are the personal
307 configuration files, which are able to change the behavior of the operations.
308 The actual operations are defined in the profile, however.
309 .P
310 When storing data, one should try to group data by its type.
311 There's sense in the Unix file system hierarchy, where configuration
312 file are stored separate (\c
313 .Fn /etc )
314 to the programs (\c
315 .Fn /bin
316 and
317 .Fn /usr/bin )
318 to their sources (\c
319 .Fn /usr/src ).
320 Such separation eases the backup management, for instance.
321 .P
322 In mmh, I've reorganized the file locations.
323 Still there are two places:
324 There's the mail storage directory, which, like in MH, contains all the
325 messages, but, unlike in MH, nothing else.
326 Its location still is user-chosen, with the default name
327 .Fn Mail ,
328 in the user's home directory. This is much similar to the case in nmh.
329 The configuration files, however, are grouped together in the new directory
330 .Fn \&.mmh
331 in the user's home directory.
332 The user's profile now is a file, named
333 .Fn profile ,
334 in this mmh directory.
335 Consistently, the context file and all the personal forms, scan formats,
336 and the like, are also there.
337 .P
338 The naming changed with the relocation.
339 The directory where everything, except the profile, had been stored (\c
340 .Fn $HOME/Mail ),
341 used to be called \fIMH directory\fP. Now, this directory is called the
342 user's \fImail storage\fP. The name \fImmh directory\fP is now given to
343 the new directory
344 (\c
345 .Fn $HOME/.mmh ),
346 containing all the personal configuration files.
347 .P
348 The separation of the files by type of content is logical and convenient.
349 There are no functional differences as any possible setup known to me
350 can be implemented with both approaches, although likely a bit easier
351 with the new approach. The main goal of the change had been to provide
352 sensible storage locations for any type of personal mmh file.
353 .P
354 In order for one user to have multiple MH setups, he can use the
355 environment variable
356 .Ev MH
357 the point to a different profile file.
358 The MH directory (mail storage plus personal configuration files) is
359 defined by the
360 .Pe Path
361 profile entry.
362 The context file could be defined by the
363 .Pe context
364 profile entry or by the
365 .Ev MHCONTEXT
366 environment variable.
367 The latter is useful to have a distinct context (e.g. current folders)
368 in each terminal window, for instance.
369 In mmh, there are three environment variables now.
370 .Ev MMH
371 may be used to change the location of the mmh directory.
372 .Ev MMHP
373 and
374 .Ev MMHC
375 change the profile and context files, respectively.
376 Besides providing a more consistent feel (which simply is the result
377 of being designed anew), the set of personal configuration files can
378 be chosen independently from the profile (including mail storage location)
379 and context, now. Being it relevant for practical use or not, it
380 de-facto is an improvement. However, the main achievement is the
381 split between mail storage and personal configuration files.
296 382
297 383
298 .H1 "Path Notations 384 .H1 "Path Notations
299 .P 385 .P
300 foo 386 foo