Re: Procmail futures

1999-01-09-00:25:16 Steve Simmons:
>   o  Is anyone actively working on procmail?
>   o  Is anyone considered to be an `owner', ie, the gateway through
>      whom all official notices must pass?
Yup, Philip Guenther is heading up a new development effort, gonna be
releasing shortly, coordinates on procmail-dev(_at_)procmail(_dot_)org 
(envelope sender
is procmail-dev-request(_at_)cuci(_dot_)nl).

> My motivation -- procmail recipe language is awful, and the code is
> written in a very unreadable style.  It's not bad code, it's just
> much harder to read than it needs to be.
>
> My plan -- run the code through indent, rip out the current filter
> language, and install tcl.
Ah, I think Philip's efforts don't align with your interests. He's making
small, very small changes to the procmail code base. Wholesale overhauls
including a complete replacement of the filter language are AFAIK beyond the
scope of his work.

I'm working on my own replacement for procmali, off-and-on. I have some
development goals which may overlap yours and lie outside Philip's interests;
these include, in roughly descending order of importance:

        - source code clear enough that anyone can examine it and convince
          themselves free of security (or Y2K) problems [easy source code
          audit]

        - clean, correct, and efficient support for Maildir built in

        - nice filtering language

and some more goals that I feel are mandatory to even be considered a possible
replacement for procmail:

        - tiny, fast executable

        - exceedingly reliable mail delivery

        - must provide procmailrc==>new lang translater, to maintain support
          for all the wonderful procmail-based facilities out there like e.g.
          Junkfilter[1]

Remember the LDA is invoked for every delivery.

By all means feel free to link TCL in to yours if you wish. Your mail delivery
performance will be maybe 1% that of procmail. TCL is a bloated whale of a
scripting language.

I'm currently expecting to use Lua[2] for my filtering language, as it is
small --- I think I'll be able to make the final LDA smaller and faster than
procmail.

-Bennett

[1] <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~gsutter/junkfilter/>
[2] <URL:http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua/>