Re: ANNOUNCE: skyrix-core-42 available

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Sunday, April 6, 2003, at 08:44  am, Helge Hess wrote:

> Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > > Why do you need MIME for NSURL ?
> > Well, strictly speaking it was for HTTP rather than MIME, but they 
> > are so similar that I
> > implemented it as the GSMime class so it could be used generally too.
>
> Hm.
>
> Sounds a bit "over-engineered" to me ;-) HTTP is far simpler than MIME 
> (more or less a small subset) even if this might not be apparent if 
> you look at it. HTTP (as available through the NSURL API) has no 
> duplicate headers, to line folding, a single charset, no line length 
> limitations, no multiparts, ...

Sure ... That's because I wanted  MIME support too ... and saw no 
reason to duplicate the code.

> Why doing more than required in the very core library ? This way not 
> only the code base is more complicated, but applications developed 
> against GNUstep are not unlikely to be incompatible to other 
> Foundations (pretty much the same way Cocoa apps are because of CF).

Only if they use the extensions ... and if they are using them it's 
because they want the capabilities, and would need to duplicate the 
functionality in some way if they wanted to port anyway.  I know we 
have a basic difference of philosophy on this.  I do not feel that 
people using the GSMime (or GXML) classes do so without knowing that 
they are extensions and get 'trapped' into non-portability without 
realising (and in any case they can use these things with other 
foundations if they want to).
Actually, for compatibility it would probably be nice to write C 
wrappers for GSXML to emulate the CF xml parsing capabilites :-)  If I 
wanted an XML based app to work on both GNUstep and MacOS-X I'd do that.

> > I suspect Pantomime didn't re-use it, because it had not been ported 
> > to MacOS-X
>
> In my understanding Pantomime's primary goal is to implement the 
> javax.mail API (which came out long after we started NGMime/NGImap4). 
> IMHO this is a good choice (I also always wanted to make things more 
> javax.mail like).

Not too bad, but like most Java APIs it is far too big.  I prefer a 
smaller selection of more flexible methods and classes.

> A MIME library cannot be implemented in a single class, MIME is a very 
> complex thing in practice.

Yes ... my sloppiness in writing the last email ...GSMime is a small 
group of classes.