Re: [WIP-PATCH 1/2] send-email: create email parser subroutine

From: Samuel GROOT <samuel.groot@grenoble-inp.org>
Date: Jun 2, 2016, 16:57 UTC
Message-ID: <9535d962-5479-5a13-472e-cd558ef163e0@grenoble-inp.org>
In-Reply-To: <20160528233329.GA1132@dcvr.yhbt.net>

On 05/29/2016 01:33 AM, Eric Wong wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> wrote:
>> Samuel GROOT <samuel.groot@grenoble-inp.org> writes:
>>
>>> Parsing and processing in send-email is done in the same loop.
>>>
>>> To make the code more maintainable, we create two subroutines:
>>> - `parse_email` to separate header and body
>>> - `parse_header` to retrieve data from header
>>
>> These routines are not specific to git send-email, nor to Git.
>>
>> Does it make sense to use an external library, like
>> http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/Email-Simple-2.210/lib/Email/Simple.pm ,
>> either by depending on it, or by copying it in Git's source tree ?
>
> That might be overkill and increase installation/maintenance
> burden.  Bundling it would probably be problematic to distros,
> too.

We have 5 solutions here:

   1. Make a new dependence to Email::Simple.

   2. Bundle Email::Simple in Git's source tree.

   3. Use Email::Simple if installed, else use our library.

   4. Making our own email parser library.

   5. Duplicate parser loop as we did for our patch to implement
      `--quote-email` as proposed in $gmane/295772 .

Obviously, option (5) is the easiest one for us, but it leaves refactoring for later, and option (1) is also easier but adds a new dependence which is not that good.

Since our project ends next week, we might not have enough time to finish developing a custom parser API so (4) is not a viable option for now but could be done in the future.

We could consider bundling Email::Simple as the best option, as it's developed since 2003 and might be safer to use than anything we could write in several weeks.