Re: Important update of Emacspeak RPM's

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just a small comment regarding this mail spool problem and my
apologies if I'm missing something, but it strikes me that  if RMAIL
and VM (and possibly other mail related programs) are able to do a
pretty good guess as to the location of the mail spool file, then the
mail alert function and the mspools package should be able to do the
same. 

Could I make the suggestion that perhapse the code in
emacspeak-speak.el be modified to check for the existance of the
environment variables MAIL and MAILBOX when setting the mail spool
directory and if those variables don't exist, fall back to a default
of /usr/spool/mail or /var/spool/mail?? My experience (which may not
amount to much :-) has been that most unix systems I have worked on
have one or both of these environment variables defined and many mail
programs use this variable. I realize that this doesn't help
with the mspools package, but it would help with emacspeak. 

I would like to be able to attempt doing a patch along these lines
myself, but my elisp is still pretty much non-existant and there is no
spare time at present. However, I do have two months holidays comming
up in December and January, and apart from a trip to the US for a few
weeks, I plan to spend time learning some elisp and hopefully make
some positive contributions to emacspeak. So, if you know of any
flaws in the suggestion to use environment variables to make a good
guess as to the location of the mail spool etc, I would still
be interested in hearing them. 

Finally, Matt, I think you deserve thanks for your work on the rpms
and identifying/eliminating problems such as the mail spool location
etc - contributions such as these make it a lot easier for people who
are not familiar with unix, make, elisp and emacs to install and try out
emacspeak which potentially expands the user base for emacspeak which
in turn raises its profile, has the potential to increase
contributions to the system and I think is generally a positive move. 

As an aside, I had a phone call from the Australian re-sellers for the
JAWS speech software last week telling me that for just $175 I could
upgrade to the new version of JAWS (a minor viersion update) which now
has better support for X, Y and Z. I told them I wasn't interested as
I now use emacspeak and its better, more stable, already supports X, Y
and Z, doesn't have hassles dealing with authentication keys and is far more
configurable. He had never heard of emacspeak and wanted to know how
much it cost - he whent very quiet when I said it was free!

Tim
Matthew Campbell writes:
>  > the absence of /usr/spool/mail on redhat systems is also 
>  > a problem for the mspools package in emacs --a better fix
>  >      (at least the one I use) is to symlink
>  >      /usr/spool to /var/spool
> 

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