toward email::simple 2.0

First:

In case you’re subscribed, note that the pep-checkins is currently busted. I haven’t even looked into it, yet. We moved PEP svn from a standalone machine to a Solaris zone recently, and I probably broke something stupid.

I bring this up because I know that it means none of you have probably seen the Email::Simple checkins I made yesterday. I’m trying to get ready to release Email::Simple 2.000. It’s going to be a great release, I think. I’m not trying to do the crazy “not-backwards-compatible changes at major version number!” thing. Instead, I’m trying to document and standardize more of the interface. My mantra for the 2.x series of Email::Simple is “better interface standardization.” I want it to do roughly the same amount of stuff, with roughly the same performance. I just want it to be clearer how one can subclass Email::Simple, and I want to refactor, document, and improve the usability of the core features of Email::Simple. (This will probably include a rewrite of the Email::Simple ↔ Data::Message relationship.)

Here’s a summary of things I checked in last night:

  • better documentation for the Email::Simple::Header object
  • provide a means to request a different header class
  • public interface for header folding
  • documented how options are passed to Email::Simple constructor
  • add options to as_string, namely options to alter header folding
  • add methods that return default values of various options
  • some performance improvements

These changes are mostly here to make it easier to subclass Email::Simple’s behavior. In almost every case, I want the answer to “how do I change Email::Simple’s” behavior to be “subclass” or (later) “use a plugin.” Since some features are really very fundamental core features, though, they seemed like a good place to demonstrate my intentions.

I’m going to release this as a _x release, soon. Please let me know, now or then, if you have any thoughts.

Written on May 30, 2007
📧 email
🐪 perl
🧑🏽‍💻 programming