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[fetchmail]Re: why one person hates fetchmail

2004-06-17 13:37:13
Perry Hutchison wrote:
and the only way I can make a poll of account 2 is by editing the
config file before polling.

I thought the cure for that sort of thing was to run two (or more)
instances of fetchmail, each with a different setting of FETCHMAILHOME.

You must admit, though, that that's a bit of an ugly hack.

The config language is a nightmare, and pretty illogical (e.g.
settings which I think should be settable globally and inherited
by all accounts, like 'ssl' for example, aren't; and working out
which settings apply to hosts and which to users has had me
digging in the source code more than once).

I haven't been reduced to digging in the source, but have had some
trial and error finding out whether certain settings are "host" or
"user".  This is largely a matter of incomplete documentation :(

Yeah, one big thing that we need to do is fix the documentation to separate 
the categories of settings.

Ideally I'd love to figure out a way to fix the config language to make 
this more explicit, but that has a lot of problems.  Fixing the docs would 
go a long way.

To be fair to fetchmail, in the olden days it *did* offer direct
to mailbox delivery, and it was ESR's decision that the design
would be made much cleaner by having delivery to a local SMTP
daemon instead. Then slowly, things crept back in like delivery
via a pipe to procmail, delivery by invoking an MTA command-line
directly, delivery by LMTP... but things I *actually* want, like
delivery to a Maildir, aren't there.

You could have procmail deliver to a maildir.

As long as we have the ability to hand off to a specified agent,
I would think it preferable -- at least, more modular -- to use a
different external agent for each type of local mail store, rather
than to try to amalgamate the lot of them into fetchmail.  You can
have fetchmail invoke the same local delivery program that sendmail
would use to write to a maildir.

True.  On the other hand....
ESR would hate the idea, but I actually think that maildir is a decent 
candidate for inclusion because it doesn't have the locking headaches that 
other formats have.

Of course, I was the one who successfully fought to get mda support put 
back into fetchmail after ESR removed it way back when.
-- 
==============================|   "A microscope locked in on one point
 Rob Funk <rfunk(_at_)funknet(_dot_)net> |Never sees what kind of room that 
it's in"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"