Controlchan and MIME

[Russ Allbery]

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)
>
> Incidentally, INN uses ExtUtils::Embed at configure time.

That's part of Perl core, thankfully.  (Added with Perl 5.6.)

> As Content-Transfer-Encoding MUST be 7bit or 8bit according to USEPRO,
> I think we can avoid the use of a real MIME package with Perl because
> there is no need to decode QP or base64.
> The two issues are to find the charset of the control article, which
> is easy with a regexp in the Content-Type: header, and to find the (first)
> application/news-groupinfo part of the message, which can also be done.

Hm... I do think there's some benefit, though, to using a regular MIME
parsing library to find the application/news-groupinfo part.  But I'm good
either way.

> As for dealing with encodings, I will need the Encode package,
> which is fortunately a core module.  So I believe there won't be
> any problem with its use.

Encode was new in 5.8, although it's available from CPAN for older
versions.  I think we should just update our install information to
require 5.8 -- it was released in 2002, which was quite a long time ago
now as software goes.  That way, we could slowly start using newer Perl
features in all of our supporting scripts.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.