Re: [VM] MIME encoding/decoding

[John Hein]

Uday Reddy wrote at 18:39 +0100 on Jul 16, 2014:
 > VM has traditionally shipped with C programs for MIME encoding/decoding.
 > Rob F created an entire Unix-like infrastructure (Make files, configure,
 > autoconf etc.) pretty much to handle just these.  If we get rid of these C
 > programs, VM can be shipped just like any other emacs library.
 >
 > Both GNU Emacs and XEmacs now have built-in encoding/decoding functionality
 > for base64.  So, we can use them.  For the Quoted Printable format,
 > emacs-lisp seems to be fast enough.  Gnus has been using it for ages and
 > everybody seems happy with that.
 >
 > So, I am thinking of getting rid of the C programs for MIME.  Does anybody
 > see any problem with that?
 >
 > Cheers,
 > Uday
 >
 > (Coming back after a long hibernation)

We should check the performance of builtin decoding - particularly
with larger messages on slower machines.  That said, most of the unix
flavors & cygwin out there now have one or more command line tools to
en/decode base64 (less prevalent are qp tools) which can take the
place of the vm versions:

mmencode   (both)
mimencode  (both)

base64
b64en/decode
qprint

not to mention perl & python one liners.