Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 10:35:14 -0600
From: escargo@anubis.network.com (David S. Cargo)
Message-Id: <199801301635.KAA24037@brutus.network.com>
To: calvin-ui98@dagobah.stwing.upenn.edu
Subject: Re: radical proposal
It appears my radical proposal ideas arrived out of order. I
didn't know listservs would do that.
Anyway, my proposal really means dropping the FTP interface portions
entirely. Our projected users would be assumed to be able to use
existing FTP tools to move files themselves.
The functions of the product available through the interface would be
creating and editing multiple projects
within each project
edit the list of sources (now just local files)
edit the list of filters
edit the list of archives
within each archive
edit the list of attributes (mostly determined by hypermail)
the input file
the output directory
the label
etc.
edit the processing steps
the order of the source files (if there's more than one)
the application of the filters (if any are applied)
For the purpose of performing the actual work, I think we might
want to have a test button that makes sure input files are present,
necessary directories exist, etc.
Then there would be go button that actually starts the process moving.
There would still be a file menu with new, open, save, save as, quit.
Perhaps as each tab is selected, we enable something on the menu bar
that has operations corresponding to each tab.
Even with this implementation, I think there are plenty of tasks
involved. If I had to simplify, I would make filtering as simple
as possible (three conditions, and three actions)
Three conditions would be (message.subject = string),
(message.subject = string AND message.date BEFORE date),
(message.subject = string AND message.date AFTER date).
The three actions would be (set message.subject = newsubject),
(set message.destination = filename),
(discard)
The discard action just throws the message away.
With the three conditions and three actions, we can handle a large
portion of desirable filter operations.
dsc