NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/comp/os/vms/19910

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-26 | 2.8 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!gatech!concert!ais.com!bruce
From: [e-mail] (Bruce C. Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Alternative callable editors in MAIL?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 26 Dec 92 21:37:21 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: Applied Information Systems, Chapel Hill, NC
Lines: 45

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Dave Cantor) writes:
> In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Bruce C. Wright) writes...
>>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Tim Burress) writes:
> [...]
>>> So my question is whether there is a procedure for installing a different
>>> callable editor, and having MAIL use that one instead of EDT.  I know it's a
>>> longshot, but the alternative is using the callable mail routines to write my
>>> own mailer, and it's not how I planned to spend my holiday.
>>
>>You can very often set things up so that almost any editor can be used as
>>a callable editor in MAIL.  For example, suppose you have a locally-written
>>editor named XYZ -- what you need to do to make it callable from MAIL is:
> [...]
>>    2)  Have a procedure named XYZ$EDIT in the sharable image.  The
>>    arguments should look like the callable EDT interface routine
>>    named EDT$EDIT, although I think you can just get by with 2
>>    arguments for callable MAIL (input_file, output_file).
>
> If the editor is named XYZ, then the entry point needs to be named
> XYZ$XYZ, not XYZ$EDIT.   (The entry points for some popular editors
> are TPU$TPU, LSE$LSE, and TECO$TECO.)

Are you _quite_ sure about this?  Did the behavior change recently?  I've
just tried this on a VMS V5.4 and a VMS V5.5 system, and if you name the
entry point, for example, XYZ$XYZ instead of XYZ$EDIT, then MAIL gives
you the error messages:

    %MAIL-E-ERACTED, Error activating editor XYZ
    %LIB-E-KEYNOTFOU, Key not found in tree

but naming the entry point XYZ$EDIT works as I had originally outlined.

Another anomoly that I've run across in trying this out on a couple of
VMS V5.4 systems is that if you're running DECUS UUCP, you may need to
install the XYZSHR image after all.  It seems that UUCP installs MAIL
with SYSPRV, and MAIL then won't activate the XYZSHR image (to avoid
possible security holes).  But if you're running stock VMS, then you
can avoid installing the sharable image and it all works OK.  Guess I
hadn't run across this before because when I first did that, some years
back, UUCP wasn't running on that particular VAX;  and after that, the
private editor image had usually been installed.  And when I ran a
test before my first article to make sure my memory was correct, it
worked because the machine I tested it on wasn't running UUCP.  Grrr :).

Bruce C. Wright