[MKDoc-modules] Petal::Mail usage

[Jean-Michel Hiver]

On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 15:51, William McKee wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> It's been a bit quite on the list so I thought I'd create some traffic
> <g>. Seriously, I'm considering converting my email templates which have
> been using Text::Template to Petal::Mail. Is anyone here using
> Petal::Mail currently? I've only seen JM's announcement but no follow-up
> traffic about this module.

Well, there's not many people on the mkdoc-modules list... I must said
that I haven't been promoting it very much.

I do not use Petal::Mail directly at the moment. Petal::Mail is,
however, refactored existing MKDoc code. Once I get around to finally
releasing MKDoc 1.6, I will suppress the old code from MKDoc and make it
use the new module: divide and conquer...

The problem is that it takes enormous amounts of time to refactor all
the code which is in MKDoc, add desired features, write documentation,
write test suite, etc. To add insult to injury, it don't buy the baby a
new bonnet... but it's a necessary step to take: I just can't cope with
an ever-increasing code base anymore.

Anyways that's why it takes so much time to release all those modules.
There's so much to do!

So far we've got:

Petal
Petal::Mail
MKDoc::XML
MKDoc::Control_List


To come soon:

* A module to Cache / Speedup Apache::Registry scripts
  (MKDoc::Registry_Cache ??)

* A generic Permission / Security manager
  (MKDoc::Authorization ??)

* A generic User signup system / authentication system
  (MKDoc::Authentication ??)

Then when I've released all of them modules, there is going to be
herculean amounts of work to refactor the existing code and cable it
with the new modules, make sure it's all backwards compatible, etc.
etc... things aren't getting better :/


> I also have a question about usage. In the example msg given in the POD,
> the signature is encased inside of a <pre> tagset. I tried changing that
> to <p> and saw that the system ignored carriage returns which is good
> since this is the defined behavior of <p> according to XHTML/HTML4
> specs. However, for those of us who are ignorant of the specs, it'd be
> nice to add in the docs that <p> tags ignore white space (which includes
> carriage returns, extra spaces, tabs, etc.).

I have seen your patch. That's great :)


> While testing, I had problems with Taint again. Specifically at line 63
> in Petal/Cache/Disk.pm. I tried setting $Petal::TAINT=1 but that did not
> help. I'm not going to debug this problem right now; just wanted to note
> it. Well, nix that; it's working now. Not sure what changed though which
> worries me a bit.

??


> A few more comments on the docs:
> 	- shouldn't the Synopsis contain 'use Petal::Mail;'?

Yes :)


> 	- I presume that the %args hash being passed to process is the same
> 	  as in Petal. It'd be helpful to describe the process function and
> 	  its parameters.

Yep :)


> 	- there is no documentation for the send function

That's because it's _exactly_ the same arguments as process(). All it
does is call process() and dump the results into sendmail...


> I have attached a patch which includes these proposed changes and a fix
> for an unclosed list (the XHTML tags).

Cheers!


> BTW, when I run pod2html locally, it is adding 'manpage' to L<> items.
> Does anyone know why is this happening?  It's also creating a bogus
> link.

I have no idea what's going on here :(
Thanks for your ever useful contribution!


Cheers,
Jean-Michel.