From: rap@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 89 17:52:48 -0500
Message-Id: <8911062252.AA28860@MORPHEUS.MIT.EDU>
To: mackay@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: argus2@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: mackay@ATHENA.MIT.EDU's message of Wed, 01 Nov 89 21:21:26 EST <8911020221.AA27101@E40-368-1.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Message types...

   From: mackay@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
   Date: Wed, 01 Nov 89 21:21:26 EST


   I used the ruleeditor to select message type MSG.  It then ignored 
   all the rules until I removed that field.  I thought "MSG" was 
   supposed to be considered a general message (in other words, all 
   messages are of type "MSG" unless specified otherwise).  I realize 
   that this is a can of worms, since there are lots of problems with 
   naming message types -- but can someone give me the rationale behind
   what we actually implemented, so that we can document it?  Thanks.

   W

I had originally implemented this as a runrules-invisible field, so that
runrules would not look for field type XXX.  Unfortunately, this still
showed up in the rulebrowser because the ruleprint code doesn't take out
fields which are not executed by runrules.  So we went ahead and said that
if someone adds a new message type then it will check for a field called
"Message-Type" XXX".  This kinda stinks, so I reccomend that in the
documentation it tell people to remove that field.  This is a rule language
limitation bug... I don't like it, but we wanted messages types.

	__Rich.