John Hinsley <jhinsley at telinco.co.uk> wrote:> 
> It's really the difference (I think) between a Mac/Windows way of doing
> things and a *nix way. On nixes, the dialler is absolutely distinct from
> the Netscape or whatever application: the emailer  doesn't call the
> dialler (nor does it assume a diallup connection), but will complain if
> it's not connected. (I guess you could say that this is part of the *nix
> paradigm: rather than having each program which requires diallup to have
> it's own dialler, you write one good dialler and everything else can use
> it.) Thinking of just how complex a peice of software a dialler is, and
> that getting Celeste to grab the password from wherever whatever *nix
> dialler is in use stores it would be a wee bit tricky, I'm not *that*
> surprised that they wrote it as they did. And it probably also makes it
> easier to use the same code for different OSs. Even though it does
> require you to enter the password twice (and there may be security
> implications in this).  
Or in other words, the Unix way is to create a strong abstraction, and
maintain it. In this case, either your apps have TCP/IP connections
available, or they don't. What do your socket using applications have
with your ISP authentication?!? The Mac/Windows way is to create a user
experience more users will accept (and if possible, that they won't like
to let go of). Specifically, the user clicks on Netscape, and gets to
look at their mail (if not understanding what's going makes this user
less comfortable the first time they try to use an alternative, so much
the better...). Except for the (very real and important) parts
parenthesized, I agree equally with both kinds of reasoning. 

To me it's not very important to bring the dialing into Squeak (though
I've considered a quick hack using OSProcess), which would be needed to
make a model that handles both connecting and email together and
conviniently.

> But no *nix email software will ask you for your password unless, I
> guess -- you can't do this with the 4* series of Netscape -- you're
> trying to grab mail from a server not belonging to the ISP you're hooked
> up to. 
Actually, I'm pretty sure they would (ask). Do you have examples to the
contrary?

AFAIK - GNU/Linux at least, maintains a central list of usernames and
passwords to be use in authentication when connecting to an ISP. These
are called the "PAP (or CHAP) secrets" file. The same file is used
whether you connect using a regular modem or an ADSL modem over
ethernet, or whatever. However, there is no such common abstraction for
"mail profiles". So I seriously doubt Netscape (or any of the mail
clients I know for GNU/Linux) would try to autodetect my mail profile.
But, having used Celeste for quite a while, I don't really know.

> John

Daniel