movemail re-write [was Re: TODO additions]

[Dave Love]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     The bulk of it was apparently done by
>     Sperber, but I didn't check it thoroughly.
> 
> Would you be willing to check thoroughly, so we could tell if we could
> use that code?

I thought it made sense for anyone doing the work to see what code
they needed first, but to save another round of mail I checked.  [Most
people could do this, but time I spend time on it is taken from mule
work that nobody else helps handa with.]

I can supply someone willing to do the work with a diff that's all
Sperber's work, and thus assigned.  It's between _old versions_ of the
_XEmacs_ source, though.

> Or do you have a different implementation to recommend to do the same
> job?

No.  It may not be so difficult to change the compile-time checks in
movemail to runtime ones; I don't know and I probably don't understand
enough about locking methods.  The idea is to specify a lock method
that the system can support via environment variable EMACSLOCKMETHOD
or a flag.  E.g. on Debian with the binary from the XEmacs package:

$ ./movemail --help
Usage: movemail [-rvxkh] [-l lines ] [-m method ] [-i] inbox [-o] destfile 
[[-p] POP-password]
where method is one of: dot, lockf, flock
Default is: dot
$ EMACSLOCKMETHOD=flock
$ ./movemail --help
Usage: movemail [-rvxkh] [-l lines ] [-m method ] [-i] inbox [-o] destfile 
[[-p] POP-password]
where method is one of: dot, lockf, flock
Default is: flock

To allow reading several spools with different lock methods, any Lisp
which runs movemail would probably have to be more flexible, of
course.