Re: HylaFAX Features ( Was: Total NEWBIE )

[Steve Williams <steve@genie96.com>]

Howdy,

I couldn't sit idle and not respond to one of the points in this email.

[Re: one of the problems with HylaFAX]

>       plenty of logs are provided.
>    3. The command line option parser it sensitive to ordering of options. This
>       is stupid. A simple function such as getop() would solve that problem.
>       Sometimes people forget about it and start having "weird" behaviors.

The sendfax program has been designed specifically so that the ordering of 
the command line arguments IS IMPORTANT.  

The ordering of the command line arguments permits the queuing of many faxes
for multiple destinations with the SAME FAX BODY, but different fax cover 
pages, and different destinations.

Now, why would this be important, you might wonder?  Consider the situation of
sending out 500 faxes to different people.  If you have to send each fax
individually, there will be 500 copies of the body of the fax on your hard 
disk.  If you send it to multiple destinations with one sendfax command,
then you only get one copy of the body of the fax on your hard disk.  

By having the command line arguments in a specific order permits each of those
500 faxes to have a different cover page.

Pretty cool when you think about it.

Using something like "getopts" would totally mess up this concept.

I couldn't sit back & let people think this is a "negative" feature.  It is
a very powerful feature, though, yes, I have to agree, it can cause some
confusion for those people used to programs where ordering of command line 
arguments are not important.

Thanks for letting me vent<g>,
-- 
	Steve Williams, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
	Genie Computer Systems Inc.
	steve@genie96.com