Re: Help setting up POP3 email (rmail)

[Emanuel Berg]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> myself a fan of maildir (one file per message plus
> hiding metadata in the file name -- I just don't
> like that) -- but it's as Unixy as it gets (qmail,
> D.J. Bernstein, ca 1990-some).

Development on UNIX in particular started in 1969.

The first manual was published internally in 1971.
But the by-now famous man pages aren't like the manual
you get when you buy a decibel meter at Crooks"R"Us.
It is as much a definition and specification of the
system as a documentation thereof.

UNIX was officially announced in 1973.

The Unix file system is based on inodes to contain
file attributes, which lend itself to elaborate file
systems, including nested directory hierarchies...

The manual, the man pages, (not) coincidentally, are
not stored in a single file -

    ls /usr/share/man

- but are a bunch of (g)roff files which are displayed
by a pager, a precursor to the system of PDFs and
LaTeX, as well as the web browsers that does the same
with HTML and CSS to display a web page.

The whole UNIX, by now GNU/Linux toolchain, is also
based on operations on text, which are stored in
files. If everything that was associated by purpose or
form would be in single files, you could virtually
throw away three quarters of the tools as they would
be totally hampered anyway.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573