Controlchan and MIME

[William F. Maton Sotomayor]

On Sat, 3 Jan 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:
>
>> Can we use MIME::Parser in controlchan?
>> (and add it to the list of requirements in the man page and INSTALL)
>>
>> It would be easier to decode control messages and extract
>> useful information (encodings and parts).
>> We could also remove the currently used parse_article() in order
>> to take benefit from MIME::Parser.
>
> It would definitely be nice, and it's a standard package with most
> distributions.  It's also way more attractive than rolling our own MIME
> parser.
>
> The only drawback is that it's not a Perl core package, so people would
> need to install it if they're building everything by hand before they
> install INN.

My only misgiving is Perl's dependency syndrome that can sometimes lead to 
long chains of dependencies which could completely fail if just one module 
fails to compile.  Granted, I think the incidence of this is (I hope) on 
the decline, but the worry is still there.

Not diving too deeply in MIME::Parser, what dependency exposure is there 
should this route be taken?

I'm all for not reinventing the wheel, one just has to be careful here.

wfms