[Nmh-workers] Announcing MH at SourceForge and update to MH book

[Jerry Peek]

Last summer, Bill Wohler, John Romine, and I decided that MH's
existence at the University of California, Irvine, had become
tenuous since John left UCI's ICS department.  We decided to
move the MH archive and book to SourceForge.

MH's new home is http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/.  (We couldn't
get just "mh" because SourceForge won't allow names that short.)
Bill has done most of the moving and reorganizing... thanks, Bill!

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THE BOOK: is now at http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/.  Bill
took this opportunity to rework the look and feel and navigation.
Now that most of us don't have slow Internet access, there's a
single large table of contents (on the book's home page) and a
single index.  There's also a Google site search (though it may be
a month or two before all of the pages have been spidered).

If you want to contribute, please join address@hidden
[1].  One of us can make you a developer.  It would be great for one
of the MH mailutils developers to embellish the book if necessary.
Another idea that was floated was to convert the HTML to a wiki to
make it even easier for folks to contribute.  If anyone knows how to
do that automatically, please start a conversation on rand-mh-devel.

-------

THE MH ARCHIVE: Bill also tried to make sense of the entropic pile
of files at UCI and to repack them at SourceForge.  These files were
split into 5 packages: Archives, Contributed Software, Documentation,
MH, and MH Book [2].  Nearly everything was preserved; only very
obvious trash was discarded.  (The old files are all still on
ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/mh/ and on http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/book/
-- although the book pages now all point to the SourceForge server.)

* The Archives package contains tarballs of files that didn't fit
  anywhere else.  For example, there is a tarball for scripts, a
  tarball for each year of the mh-users mailing list, and various
  files that were lying about the hierarchy.  Even the environment
  files were saved in an env release.
  
* The Contributed Software package contains a tarball of the contrib
  directory.

* The Documentation package contains a tarball of the doc directory.

* The MH package contains the various releases that were scattered
  about the hierarchy starting with version 5 released in 1985!  If
  you look carefully, you'll note that some releases have more than
  a single tarball.  They may include patches to various systems that
  were found and associated with that particular release.  Bill also
  downloaded all the patches from [3] and tarred them together into
  mh-6.8.3-patches.tgz and included it in the 6.8.3 release.

* Finally, the MH Book package contains tarballs of the various
  book releases.  For example, the 200605 release is a snapshot of
  what you see at http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/

The usual SourceForge features (Bugs, Support Requests, Patches,
Feature Requests) are active.  If you have a general question about
the archive that you think others might have, please submit a
Support Request so that it is visible.  Don't submit bug reports on
MH itself ;-).  Do submit bug reports, feature requests, and
especially patches for the MH book.  (For example, its coverage of
nmh is pretty far out of date.)  Even better, become a developer
and make the changes yourself!

Enjoy...
Jerry (with "ghost writer" Bill :)

0. http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/
0. http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/
0. http://sourceforge.net/projects/rand-mh/
1. https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rand-mh-devel
2. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=143658
3. ftp://ftp.gw.com/pub/unix/mail/mh/patches/