Re: [Evolution] FRQ: spam-complaint

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-07-12 at 19:49, Mitchell Skinner wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-07-10 at 05:11, Not Zed wrote:
> > Extensibility mechanism means being able to extend evolution
> > functionality without altering the core code.  e.g. like emacs.  If we
> > had that, then better mechanisms than a pipe would be available, and a
> > pipe would be trivial to implement.
> >
> > The problem is at the moment we have nothing.  If we start adding a
> > pseudo extensibility interface (such as 'add a button', 'run this
> > program on click') it will just be duplicating code that will get thrown
> > away when a real extensibility interface is written.
>
> Hello,
>
> I searched bugzilla and the evo users list with words like "plugin",
> "extensible", and "extensibility", and didn't find anything.

Its been discussed a few times, maybe as 'scripting', but i'm not sure
the searches work right anyway.

> Is such an extensibility interface planned, or under consideration?  If
> it is, is there a time frame for it?  Is it the kind of thing that an
> outside contributor might be able to do, or would it require a deep
> knowledge of the existing codebase?

To be honest, no idea.  I've considered it heavily, i've even
investigated various approaches to it.  I only have a very mail-oriented
view of the world though (which seems to be the main users of evolution
anyway), and afaik (tho i'd probably be the last to know), nobody has
committed to anything.  Some people want to use corba, i'd prefer not to
personally as it is a fair bit of work, on the other hand, it does let
you do some nice things.  If orbit was threadsafe i would probably go
with that solution.  Guile looks reasonable, its not threadsafe yet, but
you can run multiple interpreters, although a bit heavy to get going.  I
dont consider perl useful, and i dont like python (its extensibility api
sucks too).

Miguel recently suggested using mono as a virtual machine to plug
various languages into which seems a reasonable idea.  Although afaik
the only language available to us (for the present) would be c hash,
which isn't really appropriate as a scripting language.

Guile looked nice to me because its pretty easy to add to your program
and to extend, and provides enough power to write a whole application.

> I've been thinking it might be nice to integrate with things like
> SpamAssasin or Vipul's Razor without requiring the user to run
> fetchmail/procmail.

Well with an extensibility interface you can do whatever you like, and
we dont have to agree with it :)