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From James.Stevens@jrcs.co.uk  Mon Aug 25 18:11:36 1997
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Seeing Eric tip us that we could run a "fetchmail -quit" in the
"ip-down" script, I thougt it would be neat to run a fetchmail
collection in the "ip-up" script. That way mail is collected
automatically every time I am connecting to Internet for whatever reason
(I use "diald" to automatically manage my connection).

However, it did not work. It hung right after the POP3 login. I tracked
this down to the fact that the "pppd" masks a wide range of signals and
this means a time-out does not kick in. As I run the "ip-up" script in
"bash" this masking is inheritied by "fetchmail".

So, I wrote a silly little "C" program that unmasks all signals and then
runs a command of you choice (in this case fetchmail). This is the code
for that program :-

#include <stdio.h>
#include <signal.h>

main(int argc,char * argv[])
{
sigset_t set;

    if (argc>1)
        {
        sigfillset(&set);
        sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK,&set,NULL);
        system(argv[1]);
        }
}

I call it "allsigs". So, now in my "ip-up" I have the line :-

allsigs "fetchmail -f /etc/fetahmail"

Note the quotes as "allsigs" only looks at argv[1]. I guess this
unmasking of all signals could be added into "fetchmail" ?

James
nalysis" /> <title>Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</title> <style type="text/css"> /*<![CDATA[*/ span.c6 {color: brown} span.c5 {color: red} span.c4 {color: lime} span.c3 {color: blue} div.c2 {text-align: center} h1.c1 {text-align: center} /*]]>*/ </style> </head> <body> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page header"> <tr> <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td> </tr> </table> <hr /> <h1 class="c1">Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</h1> <p>The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data pulled directly out of the project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts, <a href="timeseries">timeseries</a> and <a href="growthplot">growthplot</a>. If you see a broken-image icon, upgrade to a <a href="http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html">browser that can view PNGs</a>.</p> <div class="c2"><img src="growth.png" alt="Fetchmail trends graph" /></div> <p>The graph shows the population growth of the fetchmail project. The horizontal scale is days since baseline, which is when I started collecting statistics in October 1996 at version 1.9.0. Left vertical scale is number of participants. There is one data point for each release; therefore, the changes in density of marks indicate release frequency.</p> <p>The peak in the earliest part of the graph (before the note "Bad addresses dropped") seems to be an artifact; I was not regularly dropping addresses that became invalid at the time. Turnover on the list seems to be about 5% per month (but that's just my estimate, I don't have numbers on this).</p> <p>The <span class="c3">blue scatter of squares</span> is total participants. The <span class="c4">green scatter of crosses</span> is the count of people on fetchmail-friends after I split the list. The <span class="c5">cyan scatter of diamonds</span> is the population of fetchmail-announce after the split.</p> <p>The <span class="c6">brown scatter of diamonds</span> tracks project size in lines of code (right vertical axis). The scale relationship between this scatter and the other three is arbitrary.</p> <p>This graph is quite revealing. Several trends stand out:</p> <ul> <li> <p>Over time, the project population displays rather consistent linear growth.</p> </li> <li> <p>The key event in the project's lifetime was release 4.3.0 in October 1997, when I declared the code to be out of development and in maintainance mode, and split the fetchmail list.</p> </li> <li> <p>The run-up to 4.3.0 saw the most intensive spate of releases in the project's history (the gap in that run happened when I took a two-week vacation). It was followed by a significant slowdown.</p> </li> <li> <p>After 4.3.0, the developer population remained fairly stable around an average of about 250 participants.</p> </li> <li> <p>Essentially all population growth after 4.3.0 happened on the announce list, among people using fetchmail but not active co-developers.</p> </li> <li> <p>The growth trend in code size looks sublinear, perhaps logarithmic.</p> </li> </ul> <p>The linear growth trend in population is particularly interesting; a priori we might expect geometric or logistic growth, given that the project spreads by word of mouth.</p> <p>It has been suggested that the linear growth rate is the result of a situation in which both number of projects and the population of eligible programmers are rising on trend curves of the same (probably exponential) rate.</p> <hr /> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page header"> <tr> <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td> </tr> </table> <br clear="left" /> <address>Eric S. Raymond <a href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com">&lt;esr@thyrsus.com&gt;</a></address> </body> </html>