On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 11:12:02AM -0500, Chris Garrigues wrote:
More recently, the strategy that applications have used to implement
(b) is to embed a language such as tcl instead.
This statement doesn't quite match your examples below. The use of an
embedded language is to add access in that language to otherwise C
functions. The maintenance of state between separate application
invocations, as you mentioned, can be done through a "shell" program
of some kind. Using wish or tcl as a front-end shell to nmh commands
is not really embedding wish or tcl.
If you wish to keep state for things like IMAP, you can go the route
of a building a front-end, or you can do something similar to
ssh-agent. ssh-agent is a separate program that forks off to the
background to save authenticated keys. When ssh is invoked, it looks
for ssh-agent first before asking the user to authenticate himself.
The communication between ssh and ssh-agent is through a local UNIX
socket, the location of which is either indicated by an environment
variable or searched for by the program itself.
To do IMAP with nmh, I see this type of agent program (daemon) to be
one possible answer. To do that we would have to create both the
agent, and we would have to make the existing nmh tools agent-aware.
I've been toying with this idea for some time, but haven't had any
time to code it. Ideas, suggestions, rebuttals? ;-)
There is one other problem with getting nmh to work over IMAP. The
IMAP daemon's themselves must understand the MH format. I believe UW
has mh support as a "legacy", but I haven't spent enough time to get
my own use of it working. Any feedback on IMAP daemons that work with
the MH format.
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie(_at_)wookimus(_dot_)net> | a.k.a. ^chewie
http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr