Re: [gmime-devel] Putting GMime into Bongo

[Alex Hudson <alex bongo-project org>]

Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> Haha, back when it was Hula at Novell, I had a talk with those guys at
> lunch when I was out in Provo and they were interested in looking into
> GMime, but I don't think they ever got around to it.
>   

Hehe, I never knew that :) I suspect you're right, I don't remember 
anyone looking at it (though I was just a Hula acolyte then, rather than 
a hacker).

> DBMail (a free software imap server) is using GMime 2.2.x right now as
> far as server software goes. There's also Balsa and Pan which use it on
> the client-side and from what I've been told, Brazil's main ISP and
> PennState U. both use it in custom spam-filters which filter all mail
> that comes through.
>   

Cool. If it's good enough for them, it's probably good enough for us. 
The abort() situation in malloc is probably not a deal-breaker - we need 
a policy on that anyway, and a global abort() might actually be a 
relatively graceful way of doing it (we have a lot of little daemons, 
and one overall manager, so having one throw an abort might be an easy 
way to signal that the whole system's in trouble and we should stop 
doing things like accepting mail ;).

I've asked another one of our hackers, who previously wrote part of one 
of the parsers :), to take a look at GMime and see what he thinks. I 
think my main concern at this point is that we would effectively have a 
lot of code "duplicated" (glib versus bongoutil/others, iconv versus 
bongostreamio, etc.) but some of this stuff I'd be looking to get rid of 
in the longer term anyway, and the pain of having multiple MIME parsers 
(we actually have two) is probably worse.

We'd probably also want to look at the functionality of the two code 
bases and see if there was anything that we have that you don't; I 
imagine the odds of that are pretty small, but you never know :)

Thanks again,

Alex.