[Petal] Petal::Mail 0.2 released

[Jean-Michel Hiver]

> You know, I resisted this module for awhile thinking the same thing--who
> would want to write email templates in XML format? However, upon further
> reflection, I decided it may not be too crazy as it allows complete
> control of the headers and makes a very neat format for storing emails
> that can be edited via GUI (granted this is theoretical as I haven't
> actually done this yet).

You've given yourself away - now I'm looking forward to this GUI thing
:) Maybe you could make an application which generates Petal email
templates using Petal itself or something :)


> I have been happily using the Mail::Sendmail module for years but
> recently ran into some header issues which could only be resolved by
> patching the source since this module takes care of setting/removing
> several headers[1]. It'd have been much easier with Petal::Mail.

Yes I think this is a mistake with most mail modules, they want to hide
all this really useful header stuff. Of course Petal::Mail assumes you
know a bit about email headers... depends what you're after really.


> > It does pretty much the same thing as version 0.1, except that it has
> > less bugs since I finally had some time to apply William's patches :)
> 
> Wishlist item: Use Net::SMTP to handle all mail sending instead of
> relying on a local MTA (which prob. isn't available on some platforms).

I thought of that but then you enter the annoying problem of mail
queues. What happens if the server is temporarily down? Sendmail takes
care of all these things, Net::SMTP doesn't...

I suppose one could make a basic_sendmail.pl script which could be used
as a drop-in replacement for sendmail... Since I have stricly *no use*
for it I'm not going to do it, but of course contributions are welcome
and if you want to write it I'll stick it in there :)


> > As for Petal 2.x, I have found new annoying bugs which needs sorting
> > (not mentionning the backwards compatibility modules), so watch for a
> > new release soon.
> 
> Hopefully, that will fix the annoying conversion of   characters to
> the funky A which I reported a couple weeks ago.

Unfortunately I haven't had a look at that. Some more precisions on
what's going wrong would be great.

If it's a problem *JUST* with Petal::Parser::HTB, I'm thinking of
writing a subclass to Petal called Petal::Tidy which would send HTML
files through HTML tidy (to make them XHTML) before passing them on to
Petal - with its new backend.

I am not very keen on maintaining deprecated modules & standards, so I
think this kind of 'smooth upgrade' approach might be worthwhile.

What do you think?

PS: Have you noticed? The new Petal leaves comment untouched. This
should ease your javascript itches :)
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Jean-Michel Hiver
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