Re: Use of 'inetlib' by Classpath mail providers

[Stephen Crawley]

Mark Wielaard <address@hidden> writes:
> On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 10:42 +1000, Stephen Crawley wrote:
> > Chris Burdess <address@hidden>:
> > > The underlying library used by the GNU providers is called inetlib. It =
> =20
> > > provides a much lower-level API to IMAP and other network protocols. If=
>  =20
> > > you want performance, and you can live without a MIME framework, it may=
>  =20
> > > be of interest to you.
> >=20
> > This worries me a bit.
> >=20
> > While I can see that using a native library here reduces the amount of
> > work to get the protocols supported there are clear disadvantages:
> > [...]
> > IMO, it would be a GOOD THING if you could reimplement the mail protocol
> > stack(s) in Java.
> 
> Chris is talking about code that is already part of classpath:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/inetlib
> http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/classpath/inetlib/

My mistake.  [I seem to be posting quite a bit of nonsense these days :-(]

But I still think that there is a principle here ...

> Currently it doesn't use any external libraries. But even then I don't
> think that would be a disadvantage if it provided robust new features
> when such (native) libraries were available on the platform where it was
> installed.

"If" being the operative word!  How can you be sure that a C library it is 
truly robust; e.g. in the face of inventive people trying to cause buffer 
overflows, etc?  How often do we hear that someone has found a problem in
this or that shared library that renders a bunch of applications vulnerable?

By minimizing the use of native libraries in Classpath, we reduce the 
target for the kind of problems that cause us to switch to Java in the
first place.

-- Steve