email mime breakage, line breaks, loathing
About two weeks ago, Max reported a bug with Email::MIME::Encoding related to its handling of QP and line breaks. QP and line breaks provide a totally insane problem that I talk about in my upcoming OSCON talk. It’s a mess.
I solved the problem Max was reporting, which led to more bug reports. Now tests in Email::MIME::Creator and ::Modifier failed tests. They expected to see OS-specific newlines, but instead saw CRLF.
Line breaks in Email:: code have been a serious headache since day one, for me. Some things (like pipemailers) want system newlines. Other things (like SMTP) want CRLF. You can’t just change the email content without regard for the semantics of the content (thanks, RFCs), so this is a real issue. A very reasonable way to solve this is to talk about content as a thing that can have different aspects: for example a Body::Text and Body::Blob. Text is line-oriented, and you can abstract out line endings.
Email::Simple is supposed to be simple, though, and it was intended from the start to avoid things like an object for the body. As things like Email::Simple::Creator and Email::MIME::Modifier came about, though, I think this should have been revisited.
I think that a body object is likely to happen in the future of Email::Simple and friends, and if it doesn’t, I will probably end up abandoning Email::Simple in favor of something else.
In the meantime, newline handling in Email:: is still sub-par, but all of the current releases should install properly again.