mhonarc-users

Re: MHonArc User Poll about a possible change

1996-11-07 11:24:19
Earl Hood said:
MHonArc Users,

Since many users are using Perl 5, there is a potential conflict
when specifying MIME filters and charset filters.  For example,
the current way is the following:

<mimefilters>
text/plain:mypack'filter:myfilters.pl
</mimefilters>

The problem is that a ':' is used to delimit the fields.  However,
this will conflict if Perl 5 package qualifiers are used.  Example:

<mimefilters>
text/plain:mypack::filter:myfilters.pl
</mimefilters>

Mhonarc will interpret the "::" as field delimiters.

My questions to you is what is a reasonable solution to the
problem?  Should a new field delimiter be used?  If so, what
about other resources that use ':' as a delimiter, but have
no conflict since Perl routines are not being specified (egs:
labelstyles, fieldstyles, etc).  Should mhonarc try to be
intelligent and treat "::" as a package qualifer and a single
':' as a field delimiter?  Leave things as-is and require
users to use the Perl 4 syntax?

I think it is okay to require Perl 4 syntax (Documentation) but
I would not mind if the Perl 5 "::" would be also supported.

Comments are welcome since changes may cause compatibility
problems with some users.

     --ewh

P.S.  Another questions is retaining Perl 4 compatibility still
needed?  Although MHonArc will probably not take advantage of
Perl 5 OO constructs for awhile (too much rewriting at this time),
other Perl 5 enhancements may be nice to use.

I had the impression that several postings here mentioned that they
use Perl 4.  Maybe we keep Perl 4 compatibility for V2.x and for V3.x
and higher Perl 5 will be required.

The biggest advantage I see when switching to Perl 5 are the *DBM
modules.  They would let mhonarc archive grow to several thousand
messages (thanks to multipage indexes) and prevent that read/write
.mhonarc.db files that are several 100 kilobytes big just to add
one message.

Achim
----
    Earl Hood                  |   University of California: Irvine
    ehood(_at_)medusa(_dot_)uci(_dot_)edu       |   Electronic Loiterer





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