All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

toward email::simple 2.0

rjbs on 2007-05-30T13:25:19

First: 

In case you're subscribed, note that the pep-checkins is currently busted. I haven't even looked into it, yet. We moved PEP svn from a standalone machine to a Solaris zone recently, and I probably broke something stupid.

I bring this up because I know that it means none of you have probably seen the Email::Simple checkins I made yesterday. I'm trying to get ready to release
Email::Simple 2.000. It's going to be a great release, I think. I'm not
trying to do the crazy "not-backwards-compatible changes at major version
number!" thing. Instead, I'm trying to document and standardize more of the
interface. My mantra for the 2.x series of Email::Simple is "better interface
standardization." I want it to do roughly the same amount of stuff, with
roughly the same performance. I just want it to be clearer how one can
subclass Email::Simple, and I want to refactor, document, and improve the
usability of the core features of Email::Simple. (This will probably include a rewrite of the Email::Simple<->Data::Message relationship.)

Here's a summary of things I checked in last night:

  • better documentation for the Email::Simple::Header object
  • provide a means to request a different header class
  • public interface for header folding
  • documented how options are passed to Email::Simple constructor
  • add options to as_string, namely options to alter header folding
  • add methods that return default values of various options
  • some performance improvements

These changes are mostly here to make it easier to subclass Email::Simple's
behavior. In almost every case, I want the answer to "how do I change
Email::Simple's" behavior to be "subclass" or (later) "use a plugin." Since
some features are really very fundamental core features, though, they seemed
like a good place to demonstrate my intentions.

I'm going to release this as a _x release, soon. Let us know if you have thoughts on these plans or changes: PEP Wiki

OK, any volunteers?

Simon on 2007-05-30T15:04:39

I think we're going to need an Email::Simple::Simple soon. Or maybe start again on yet another namespace.

Re:OK, any volunteers?

ask on 2007-05-31T02:27:24

Hi Simon,

Funny - but not practical or fair.

The Email::Simple API (and code!) has a lot of old suck in it - even if less than the other email modules ...

Richardo has done a great job cleaning up the API and the code to be simpler and easier to use in Real Applications.

  - ask