Internal Technical Details for mlist

Phone List

Choosing 'List' and then 2 will generate the phone list. What actually happens is that all records in mlist.dbf are scanned for those that have an 'f' in their affiliation. These are dumped out into a text file named 'fone.txt', each person on one line which has the following specific format of pipe '|' separated fields:

sanskrit|first last|home|work|cell|addr1|addr2|city|state/province|zip_post|country

There are no leading or trailing blanks in these fields.

Then a Perl script named /v/mlist/genf is executed. It reads 'fone.txt' and generates three HTML files named fone[1-3].html. Finally, these three files are ftp'ed to www.mountmadonna.org/mlist. These files (mostly fone3.html) can then be loaded into a browser and printed.

The rewrite of mlist has the responsiblity to:

• Generate fone.txt
• Invoke genf
• ftp to www.mountmadonna.org

Stale Email Purging

Choosing Other-Stale does this:

• ftp's to www.mountmadonna.org/www/cgi-bin and gets the text file 'stale' which was created by a file upload Perl script. It removes the file at www.mountmadonna.org once it has gotten it.
• The file 'stale' has one email address per line. Each stale email address is searched for within mlist.dbf (in the email field) and, if found, cleared. The number of addresses that were purged is reported.

The printer 'ftp'.

Although both reg and mlist can send a listing to www.mountmadonna.org/printer/yourname.txt I do not see a need for the rewrite to do this. Surely, the rewrite will have direct access to the printers on the network and better control of where listings will go. If you're curious how the ftp'ing works in mlist see the the perl script /local/bin/send_it. This feature was added to mlist because of some difficulty in configuring network printers in SCO Unix.

Emailing a listing.

Mlist can send a listing to an arbitrary email address. This would seem to be a desirable feature in the rewrite as well although it will probably implement it in a very different way. For how mlist does it, see the perl script in /local/bin/pmail.

Generalized Listings

Clearly, this whole mechanism needs to be rethought, redone and revamped to use SQL.