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Re: Who is the procmail maintainer? (revisited 2005)

2005-11-06 01:23:35
There are a whole lot of real-world problems for which procmail is not
the right solution.  Making procmail worse at what it does do well in
order to make it slightly better at things it currently does not do
well, is not necessarily a good thing.

Looking at the gross cludges in common procmail rc collections gives me
the impression that procmail is the right tool, but is lacking some key
features.

I don't understand the fuss about runtime extensions and performance
worries. Linux does not load binary parts which are not executed, as I
understand. Besides, how many procmail invocations (from entering
~/.procmailrc to finishing with some recipe) do you have which do *not*
call sed, awk, test, formail at least once? Me, closer to none, so
integrating all these binaries into procmail would actually improve
performance, each time any of these binaries are called. The 486 days
are past, whether a binary is 70k or 500k is irrelevant. I don't see how
this makes what procmail currently does well worse. Loading a single
binary once is faster by lots.

It would also be faster to put things like the aforementioned date
extraction into procmail than to work through screenfuls of recipe and
convoluted INCLUDERC.

That doesn't mean it's not worth considering ... but if you need perl,
you know where to find it.

Thanks, but one can go the other way in the CPU is cheaper than
efficiency tradeoff ;)

Volker

-- 
Volker Kuhlmann                 is possibly list0570 with the domain in header
http://volker.dnsalias.net/             Please do not CC list postings to me.

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