Ok. ;) First off... Nothing I say here should dampen your spirit so please don't take it that way. I really like the attitude. Seriously.
Reality check time. Hypermail has been all but dead for two+ years. In that time many of us have wanted for newer versions, wanted for features we saw in other, more cumbersome converters. Many then took to the code and hacked in their site's minimal needs, fixing the biggest of bugs, slowly working down their local buglist.
That's the past history. In the present...
I sent mail to Kevin on April 17th asking about EIT because I noticed it had gone away. He took a look at what I was doing to hypermail and offered assistance in getting me started if I wanted to take over hypermail development. I was crazy enough to do it. ;) Actually it's an extension of what I was already doing (but in a near vacuum). In the past week I have:
This has been one week from my message to Kevin. :) And I do have a real job at Network Flight Recorder (NFR) ;) Things are moving in the right direction. I know that there is a great deal of pent up desires but setting things up for a public effort such as this does take some time.
# To move from talk to action, I think it needs to be settled once and for all:
# rewrite or extending ?
We need to see what hypermail looks like after all the patches have been merged. Now I fully expect that we will want to reorganize it greatly and a re-write may be needed but that is not my initial focus. I am going to be merging the submitted patches and testing. That may end up getting us 90% of the way. Until that work is done, I just don't know.
# If we are gonna rewrite it, it takes some serious thoughts on how to build
# this in a better way than 1.02 was. If we are gonna extend the existing
# source, we need to get a version put together with as many of all good patches
# applied, so that we all have something to download and try, improve and play
# with.
Yes, to do it right will take some serious thought. We should be doing both. As soon as I have a majority of the patches integrated, I'll put up a development version for all to examine and play with.
# I am personally very interested in the developing side of this, as the
# features, the dreams and the what-we-could-do-to-this talks can and will
# continue for a long time anyway. Those talks are needed, yes, but I'd like to
# get the developer effort started at the same time.
I couldn't agree more. I can guarantee you that I will not be focused on redesigning it for a while. Sounds like you have some thoughts on it. Why don't you put together some ideas on rewriting it and bounce it off the list ? That will get us farther down the road while the submitted patches are being merged.
On second thought, maybe you could take a look at the MIME support you supplied me and extend that to deal with attachment storage and known type conversion. That is sorely needed and would be a valuable extension. You already know what that piece of the code looks like since I simply merged your enhancements. :) (Thanks for those by the way.)
# It will take some central administrator to set up the CVS repository and
# initial manual labour to make the initial version. Later, we'll need some
# coordination on the developers and the developing so that i.e certain persons
# can sign on certain tasks to be implemented.
Yep. A CVS repository is coming.
I like your attitude. :) We're getting there.
-- Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502 Email: kent_at_landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/ Email: kent_at_nfr.net http://www.nfr.net/ Please send comp.sources.misc related mail to kent_at_landfield.com Search the Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/Received on Fri 24 Apr 1998 05:02:21 PM GMT
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