Merge branch 'locking-refactor'

[sup] / README.txt

diff --git a/README.txt b/README.txt
index 419e16b51b7d9c1d5fb777b99038a564690757ac..4204270a3091ef9510be29bf6886e04f7981a900 100644 (file)
--- a/README.txt
+++ b/README.txt
@@ -4,13 +4,29 @@ sup
 
 == DESCRIPTION:
 
 
 == DESCRIPTION:
 

-Sup is an attempt to take the UI innovations of web-based email
-readers (ok, really just GMail) and to combine them with the
-traditional wholesome goodness of a console-based email client.
+Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of email.
+It supports tagging, very fast full-text search, automatic contact-
+list management, and more. If you're the type of person who treats
+email as an extension of your long-term memory, Sup is for you.

 
 

-Sup is designed to work with massive amounts of email, potentially
-spread out across different mbox files, IMAP folders, and GMail
-accounts, and to pull them all together into a single interface.
+Sup makes it easy to:
+- Handle massive amounts of email.
+
+- Mix email from different sources: mbox files (even across different
+  machines), Maildir directories, IMAP folders, and GMail accounts.
+
+- Instantaneously search over your entire email collection. Search over
+  body text, or use a query language to combine search predicates in any
+  way.
+
+- Handle multiple accounts. Replying to email sent to a particular
+  account will use the correct SMTP server, signature, and from address.
+
+- Add custom code to customize Sup to whatever particular and bizarre
+  needs you may have.
+
+- Organize email with user-defined labels, automatically track recent
+  contacts, and much more!

 
 The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds
 everywhere.
 
 The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds
 everywhere.


@@ -21,86 +37,87 @@ Features:
 
 - Scalability to massive amounts of email. Immediate startup and
   operability, regardless of how much amount of email you have.
 
 - Scalability to massive amounts of email. Immediate startup and
   operability, regardless of how much amount of email you have.

-  (At least, once everything's been indexed.)

 
 

-- Immediate full-text search of your entire email archive, using
-  the full Ferret query langauge. Search over message bodies, labels,
-  from: and to: fields, or any combination thereof.
+- Immediate full-text search of your entire email archive, using the
+  Ferret query language. Search over message bodies, labels, from: and
+  to: fields, or any combination thereof.

 
 - Thread-centrism. Operations are performed at the thread, not the
   message level. Entire threads are manipulated and viewed (with
   redundancies removed) at a time.
 
 
 - Thread-centrism. Operations are performed at the thread, not the
   message level. Entire threads are manipulated and viewed (with
   redundancies removed) at a time.
 

-- Labels over folders. Drop that tired old metaphor and you'll see how
-  much easier it is to organize email.
+- Labels instead of folders. Drop that tired old metaphor and you'll see
+  how much easier it is to organize email.

 
 

-- GMail-style thread management.  Archive a thread, and it will
-  disappear from your inbox until someone replies. Kill a thread, and
-  it will never come back to your inbox. (But it will still show up in
-  searches, of course.)
+- GMail-style thread management. Archive a thread, and it will disappear
+  from your inbox until someone replies. Kill a thread, and it will
+  never come back to your inbox (but will still show up in searches.)
+  Mark a thread as spam and you'll never again see it unless explicitly
+  searching for spam.

 
 

-- Console based, so instantaneous response to interaction. No mouse
-  clicking required!
+- Console based interface. No mouse clicking required!

 
 

-- Programmability. It's in Ruby. The code is good. It's easy to
-  extend.
+- Programmability. It's in Ruby. The code is good. It has an extensive
+  hook system that makes it easy to extend and customize.

 
 

-- Multiple buffer support. Why be limited to viewing one thread at a
+- Multiple buffer support. Why be limited to viewing one thing at a

   time?
 
   time?
 

-- Automatic context-sensitive help.
-
-- Message tagging and multi-message tagged operations.
-
-- Mutt-style MIME attachment viewing.
+- Tons of other little features, like automatic context-sensitive help,
+  multi-message operations, MIME attachment viewing, recent contact list
+  generation, etc.

 
 Current limitations which will be fixed:
 
 
 Current limitations which will be fixed:
 

-- Support for mbox ONLY at this point. No support for POP, IMAP, and
-  GMail accounts.
+- Sup doesn't play nicely with other mail clients. If you alter a mail
+  source (read, move, delete, etc) with another client Sup will punish
+  you with a lengthy reindexing process.

 
 

-- No internationalization support. No wide characters, no subject
-  demangling. 
+- Support for mbox, Maildir, and IMAP only at this point. No support for
+  POP or mh.

 
 

-- No GMail-style filters.
+- IMAP support is very slow due mostly to Ruby's IMAP library.  You may
+  consider something like offlineimap to mirror your IMAP folders with
+  local Maildir ones.

 
 

-- Unix-centrism in MIME attachment handling.
+- Unix-centrism in MIME attachment handling and in sendmail invocation.

 
 == SYNOPSYS:
 
 
 == SYNOPSYS:
 

-  1. sup-import <mbox filename>+
-  2. sup
-  3. edit ~/.sup/config.yaml for the (very few) settings sup has
-
-  sup-import has several options which control whether you want
-  messages from particular mailboxes not to be added to the inbox,
-  or not to be marked as new, so run it with -h for help.
+  0. sup-config
+  1. sup

 
 

-  Note that Sup *never* changes the contents of any mailboxes. So it
-  shouldn't ever corrupt your mail. The flip side is that if you
-  change a mailbox (e.g. delete or read messages) then Sup may crash,
-  and will tell you to run sup-import --rebuild to recalculate the
-  offsets within the mailbox have changed.
+  Note that Sup never changes the contents of any mailboxes; it only
+  indexes in to them. So it shouldn't ever corrupt your mail. The flip
+  side is that if you change a mailbox (e.g. delete messages, or, in the
+  case of mbox files, read an unread message) then Sup will be unable to
+  load messages from that source and will ask you to run sup-sync
+  --changed.

 
 == REQUIREMENTS:
 
 
 == REQUIREMENTS:
 

-* ferret >= 0.10.13
-* ncurses >= 0.9.1
-* rmail >= 0.17
+ - ferret >= 0.11.6
+ - ncurses >= 0.9.1
+ - rmail >= 0.17
+ - highline
+ - net-ssh
+ - trollop >= 1.12
+ - lockfile
+ - mime-types
+ - gettext
+ - fastthread

 
 == INSTALL:
 
 
 == INSTALL:
 

-* gem install sup -y
-* Then, in rmail, change line 159 of multipart.rb to:
-    chunk = chunk[0..start]
-  (Sorry. it's an unsupported package.) You might be able to get away
-  without doing this but if you get frozen string exceptions when
-  reading in multipart email messages, this is what you need to
-  change.
+* gem install sup
+
+== PROBLEMS:
+
+See FAQ.txt for some common problems and their solutions.

 
 == LICENSE:
 
 
 == LICENSE:
 

-Copyright (c) 2006 William Morgan.
+Copyright (c) 2006--2009 William Morgan.

 
 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
 
 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License