freebsd-ports/mail/faces/pkg-descr
Andreas Klemm f6c670a079 faces - visual mail, user and print face server
can nicely be used with exmh

Submitted by:	Lars Koeller <Lars_Koeller@odie.physik2.uni-rostock.de>
1996-12-14 22:27:51 +00:00

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What is faces?
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This is the third general release of a "faces" server for monitoring a
list visually. Typically this is a list of incoming mail messages, jobs
in the print queue or users on a system.
Faces has five different modes of operation:
(a) The default will monitor for new mail. By default, only the last ten
messages are displayed. Using the left mouse button it is possible to
toggle the text in the faces window. This will either be the username
or the time the mail message arrived. The icon shows the image of the
last message to arrive.
(b) You can monitor the whole of a mail file. The open window will
automatically adjust it's size to correctly show the face icons. The
open window options are the username or the timestamp and number of
message from that user. The icon will display the image of the last
message, and a count of the total number of messages in the spool
file or mail folder.
(c) Monitoring a given print queue. This will generate a single face icon
showing the job at the top of the print queue, and the text message
will display the printer name plus the number of jobs to be printed.
Opening the window will show images of all the jobs in the queue. The
text on each image can be toggled, choices being the owners' name and
the size of the job in bytes.
(d) Monitoring users on a machine. For each user, a face image is displayed.
Text can be either the username or the time they logged on. The iconic
form displays the total number of users.
(e) Custom monitoring. You can specify a program or shell script to run.
The standard output from this program will be read by the faces program,
and the appropriate faces displayed using the information provided. The
format of this face information is given in the faces manual page.
Included with this release, is the ability to include a face image with
your mail message using an X-Face header line (plus continuation lines).
Faces expects this line to be in a certain compressed format, and
uncompresses it, and displays that image on-the-fly. There is also an
option to automatically update the faces database with this new image.
Audio capabilities are also provided as a conditional compilation option.
By default, after every sixty seconds, faces will recheck the mail file or
the print queue. If the mail spool file has changed size, it will produce a
chain of records for which it has face icons.
This release contains graphical interfaces for NeWS, SunView, X11 and XView.
Faces is based on the AT&T v8 face server called vismon, but is not derived
from vismon sources. With the previous version came vismon compatibility.
Note that that resulted in a few changes from the way faces v1.1 worked.
See the manual pages for more details.