use Perl

• wtfsubject (Score:1)

  by educated_foo (3106)

  So I wrote my own "fetchmail"

  Dude, you are the next Eric Raymond. But with fewer bugs. And probably fewer guns. PHEAR ME IDIOTARIANS!!!
• Nice Story + My Hacks (Score:2)

  by Shlomi Fish (918)

  Nice story - I'm glad you found a solution. You probably realise that the current Fetchmail (no longer maintained by ESR) probably has these things fixed, and that the Perl Fetchmail-replacement you wrote has a very small subset of the Fetchmail features, and as such is not an accurate replacement. It works for you, but most people will not find it an accurate replacement.

  I believe many programmers wrote ad-hoc replacements for popular programs. For example, I wrote my own RSS/Atom aggregator based on
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by sigzero (5768)

    Nice story - I'm glad you found a solution. You probably realise that the current Fetchmail (no longer maintained by ESR) probably has these things fixed, and that the Perl Fetchmail-replacement you wrote has a very small subset of the Fetchmail features, and as such is not an accurate replacement. It works for you, but most people will not find it an accurate replacement.

    I think he mentioned upgrading wasn't an option. I also didn't catch where he said that he created his own "feature complete" version of fetchmail. He hacked up a "fetchmail" to do what he needed it to do (probably no more and no less). This is one of the points of Perl. : )
    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shlomi Fish (918)

      I think he mentioned upgrading wasn't an option. I also didn't catch where he said that he created his own "feature complete" version of fetchmail. He hacked up a "fetchmail" to do what he needed it to do (probably no more and no less). This is one of the points of Perl. : )

      I know he said upgrading wasn't an option. However, assuming his work constraints were not as silly as requiring RedHat 8, then everything probably would have worked as it is. See this fortune file (search for "Mozilla") [shlomifish.org] for me and others mocking the fact that some people are still using ancient software due to their work constraints.

      In regards to being "feature complete", maybe I phrased my original post in a bad way, but I knew he knew it wasn't as feature-complete as Fetchmail. What I meant was t
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by sigzero (5768)

        I am stuck on Perl 5.6.0 at the moment myself. I am looking at getting the project over to 5.8 but that is what I am stuck with at the moment. : )
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by btilly (5037)

        He didn't say that it was "as good as" Fetchmail. He said that for his needs it was better. :-)
• Damn it feels good to be a Hacker. (Score:1)

  by stu42j (6348)

  Now I have that song from Office Space stuck in my head.
• even more hackerish (Score:1)

  by jmason (3282)

  I just said "I could mail Matt, or I could write my own too". guess which option I took. NIH! ;)
  
  (mind you mine came out as 272 lines, but that's with a config file parser and support for deleting messages from some folders, while keeping messages in others and using SHA1 of the TOP output to track seen messages -- ie. the feature that my fetchmail doesn't do....)