[pmmail-list] Any thought of developing....

[Al Dunsmuir]

Menno,

I'm also a heavy (and licenced) PMINews user.  I'd prefer that Peter
do whatever it takes to make PMMail really perform and interact
well, with a focus on delivery on multiple platforms (my preferences
are OS/2, Linux, and then Windows).   

That being said, I would pay to have an additional PMINews-like
plugin that would integrate with the new PMMail, and provide solid
news group access.

I hope that Peter has access to a machine with PMINews installed,
so that he can examine it carefully.   It looks like the original 
developers of PMMail/PMINews spent a great deal of time on the user
interface portion, and did a barely functional job on much of the 
remaining core functionality code.  It was released, and then more
or less abandoned by both Stardock and the original authors.

Examples where PMINews has a lot of incomplete/broken code:  
- no checking of common error conditions (socket timeouts, disk full)
- directories in binary manager multiple file save have extraneous
  directories (from the group list name) appended.  
- a single separate last directory is remembered when viewing a 
  posting, and for single file save within the binaries manager.  For
  multiple files in the binaries manager one must always start all
  over again.
- the file save and binary decode operations use the main PM thread,
  locking out the user interface and posting upload/download
- the uudecode algorithm for multipart files is very slow, mostly due
  to an incredibly slow sort of the parts (it appears to be using many
  successive sequential iterations to attempt to order the files)
- the awful sort is also visible when downloading multiple parts with
  the "n of m" indicators in the title - it can take many minutes of high
  activity that basically locks the system to sort and present the list
  for a mere 100 posts.  It must be worse than a bubble sort!
- PMInews has the original PMMail problems with handling code points
  outside 7-bit ASCII.  I find that it corrupts many files using the
  new (and by design, much less portable) yEnc format.

In PMMail, I _really_ miss the PMINews ability to dynamically change the 
sort order by clicking on the column title blocks.  This temporarily overrides
the profile setting.  This would be a clean (and much appreciated) change 
to PMMail.

I suspect Peter would have to rewrite any code he got from Stardock
(or the original authors) completely.  It might be useful to have that code
as a reference to save some time in the rewrite, rather than writing from 
scratch. If the original is not available, I suspect it would still not take
Peter that long to come up with a clone, using the PMINews interfaces as a 
model - I suspect he now knows much more about much of the PMMail code than 
the original authors.

The NNTP protocols are not that complex, and I suspect basic upload and
download of newgroup items would be reasonable straightforward.  One would
want to use the new PMMail indexing and storage code, rather than maintaining
compatibility with the current PMINews files.   A one-time conversion utility 
to migrate between separate directory trees would be necessary in the final
product.

With respect to the file decoding, I would suggest looking at the algorithms 
used by the better tools (eg uudeview for multipart binary decoding) and then 
writing a new implementation.   The good news is that in the end, Peter would
write solid code, and it would be nearly impossible to perform as badly as the
original PMINews code.

Some folks have been looking at reverse engineering PMINews.  There are a
number of tools that have managed to decode the file formats.  I am sure the 
authors would contribute that information to Peter.  As to the reversing the
PMINews code, I had personally considered doing that but concluded that it
would be a dead end, as the original code was simply not that good (except for
the user interface) and would not be worth the effort. 

I am sure that there are are a number of folks (including myself) who would be 
happy to help Peter in the testing (and some coding) of a complete and solid 
PMINews replacement, especially if it makes life on new systems such as Linux
more familliar in the future (home sweet OS/2 for now).

Done ramblings for now,
Al Dunsmuir

On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 11:55:44 +0200, Menno Tillema wrote:

>On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 08:50:23 +0100 (BST), Simon Bowring wrote:
>
>>I hope Peter will at least ensure that the new version will not
>>destroy or change our old address book files (on OS/2), otherwise
>>us dual PMMail/PMINews users will lose our PMINEws 
>>address books :-(
>
>I'm one of those (licensed) PMINews users. Is it possible to keep the
>old addreess books (for compatibality) and store new/extra info in a
>seperate file format? So PMMail users will have both?
>--- 
>Tot mails, <Menno>

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