what's xbiff? -----Original Message----- From: Bill Mills-Curran [mailto:bill@mills-curran.net] Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 8:47 AM To: Worcester Linux Users Group Subject: [Wlug] xbiff Now that xbiff is gone (not in fc3), what's a good replacement? I've gotten a lot of good use out of xbiff & use it to notify me about a number of things. I'm surprised it's gone, but I guess it's time to move on. Suggestions? Thanks, Bill _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 08:49:38AM -0500, Martin, Eric J. wrote:
what's xbiff?
"biff": name of the pet dog of one of the original (1970-190's) coders. Dog used to bark whenever the mailman came. Program created to announce when you got email was named after that "biff". Xwindows version of same functionality became "xbiff". replacement? hmm - my email clients seem to let me know without extra features. -- Linux/Open Source: Your infrastructure belongs to you, free, forever. Idealism: "Realism applied over a longer time period" http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/ http://kinz.org http://www.fedoratracker.org http://www.fedorafaq.org http://www.fedoranews.org Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:38:52AM -0500, Charles R. Anderson wrote:
Hey Phro, do you still maintain PhroMail ;-)
That's Frank Sweetsers baby, isn't it? The Mutt E-Mail Client "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." - me, circa 1995 (me - Mike Elkins - mutt author)
_______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug
-- Linux/Open Source: Your infrastructure belongs to you, free, forever. Idealism: "Realism applied over a longer time period" http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/ http://kinz.org http://www.fedoratracker.org http://www.fedorafaq.org http://www.fedoranews.org Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
==> Regarding Re: [Wlug] xbiff; Jeff Kinz <jkinz@kinz.org> adds: jkinz> On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:38:52AM -0500, Charles R. Anderson wrote:
Hey Phro, do you still maintain PhroMail ;-)
jkinz> That's Frank Sweetsers baby, isn't it? Yes, Frank wrote that when learning to program with the gtk+ library, iirc. I never maintained it, though I did submit patches. ;) From the readme: ,---- | Where the heck did you come up with *that* name? | --------------------------- | | When I first started writing this program, I didn't have a good name for | it. I mentioned to a friend of mine - you guessed it, his nickname was | Phro - that I was writing an xbiff replacement. He said "Yeah! You can | call it phromail - it'll send you mail to let you know that you've got new | mail!" While the overall idea didn't quite pan out, the name stuck. `---- -Jeff (a.k.a. phro)
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:07:18AM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote:
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 08:49:38AM -0500, Martin, Eric J. wrote:
what's xbiff?
"biff": name of the pet dog of one of the original (1970-190's) coders. Dog used to bark whenever the mailman came.
Correction: "biff": name of the pet dog of one of the original (1970-1980's) Berekley coders. Dog used to bark whenever the mailman came. -- Linux/Open Source: Your infrastructure belongs to you, free, forever. Idealism: "Realism applied over a longer time period" http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/ http://kinz.org http://www.fedoratracker.org http://www.fedorafaq.org http://www.fedoranews.org Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:07:18AM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote: <snip>
replacement? hmm - my email clients seem to let me know without extra features.
Jeff, Mine notifies me, too, but only if I'm in that screen. (Multiple screens (insert correct name if not "screens") on my desktop.) Also, I use it to notify me of new activity in other files. It's really quite flexible and useful for local event notification. Bill
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:50:13AM -0500, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:07:18AM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote:
replacement? hmm - my email clients seem to let me know without extra features.
Mine notifies me, too, but only if I'm in that screen. (Multiple screens (insert correct name if not "screens") on my desktop.) Also, I use it to notify me of new activity in other files. It's really quite flexible and useful for local event notification.
Sounds very useful. I believe Gnome and KDE have built something into their respective packages to do similar functionality. Also- didn't something called "inotify" just make it into the kernel? I think that is also a file change notification utility? -- Linux/Open Source: Your infrastructure belongs to you, free, forever. Idealism: "Realism applied over a longer time period" http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/ http://kinz.org http://www.fedoratracker.org http://www.fedorafaq.org http://www.fedoranews.org Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
==> Regarding Re: [Wlug] xbiff; Jeff Kinz <jkinz@kinz.org> adds: jkinz> On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:50:13AM -0500, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:07:18AM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote: > replacement? hmm - my email clients seem to let me know without extra > features.
Mine notifies me, too, but only if I'm in that screen. (Multiple screens (insert correct name if not "screens") on my desktop.) Also, I use it to notify me of new activity in other files. It's really quite flexible and useful for local event notification.
jkinz> Sounds very useful. I believe Gnome and KDE have built something jkinz> into their respective packages to do similar functionality. jkinz> Also- didn't something called "inotify" just make it into the jkinz> kernel? I think that is also a file change notification utility? It's not in the kernel as of 2.6.10. There are patches, of course, but even if it were in the kernel, it wouldn't be a drop in replacement for xbiff (obviously). Though, it wouldn't be too difficult to write a replacement using inotify. -Jeff
==> Regarding Re: [Wlug] xbiff; Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com> adds: ==> Regarding Re: [Wlug] xbiff; Jeff Kinz <jkinz@kinz.org> adds: jkinz> On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:50:13AM -0500, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:07:18AM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote: > replacement? hmm - my email clients seem to let me know without extra
features.
Mine notifies me, too, but only if I'm in that screen. (Multiple screens (insert correct name if not "screens") on my desktop.) Also, I use it to notify me of new activity in other files. It's really quite flexible and useful for local event notification.
jkinz> Sounds very useful. I believe Gnome and KDE have built something jkinz> into their respective packages to do similar functionality. jkinz> Also- didn't something called "inotify" just make it into the jkinz> kernel? I think that is also a file change notification utility? jmoyer> It's not in the kernel as of 2.6.10. There are patches, of course, jmoyer> but even if it were in the kernel, it wouldn't be a drop in jmoyer> replacement for xbiff (obviously). jmoyer> Though, it wouldn't be too difficult to write a replacement using jmoyer> inotify. I just looked into this further. It seems inotify, in its current form, has little chance of inclusion in mainstream kernels. Al Viro puked all over it, and with good reason. You could use dnotify, but that would mean more caching within the user space app than should be necessary. But, that really isn't the issue here. Sorry, Bill, I don't know what others use to replace xbiff. You could always build and install it yourself, especially since it works for you. -Jeff
On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 05:11:58PM -0500, Jeff Moyer wrote:
==> Regarding Re: [Wlug] xbiff; Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com> adds:
==> Regarding Re: [Wlug] xbiff; Jeff Kinz <jkinz@kinz.org> adds: jkinz> Also- didn't something called "inotify" just make it into the jkinz> kernel? I think that is also a file change notification utility?
jmoyer> It's not in the kernel as of 2.6.10. There are patches, of course,
Its in Andrew's tree, with patches being applied (quickly) as people find problems. :)
jmoyer> but even if it were in the kernel, it wouldn't be a drop in jmoyer> replacement for xbiff (obviously).
Ya, its a lower level facility one would use to build an xbiff replacement.
jmoyer> Though, it wouldn't be too difficult to write a replacement using jmoyer> inotify.
Ah, yes, quite. :)
I just looked into this further. It seems inotify, in its current form, has little chance of inclusion in mainstream kernels. Al Viro puked all over it, and with good reason.
Al did point out a problem with a umount call in the middle of a inotify operation, but someone else (Mike Waychison) provided a patch for that problem. (Which may or may not be accepted, but Robert seems to like it). (FOI "For other's information" - background) Inotify is supposed to provide the low level dnotify-like functionality but with a much lower resource impact. I like that (assuming it can be done.) I've always hated seeing how much CPU fam was using, it seems like such a waste for something that appears to be trivial. (but like all things, may be harder than they appear). -- http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/ http://www.fedoratracker.org http://www.fedorafaq.org http://www.fedoranews.org Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
participants (5)
-
Bill Mills-Curran -
Charles R. Anderson -
Jeff Kinz -
Jeff Moyer -
Martin, Eric J.