New Code! (part 2)
Postoffice is joining the fun of the new code release festival by being shoved up to version 1.4.10, which does not have the new configuration code from discount in it (yet,) but which does have a minor code change:
When I wrote postoffice in the first place, I made
up a fairly elaborate state machine to process CRLF.CRLF and LF.LF
(for network and terminal traffic, respectively) and collapse down
CRLF network line terminators to LF Unix line terminators. With
well-behaved clients, this seemed to work very well, but there seems
to be a largish body of mailers out there that appear to add additional
CR’s to their mail bodies. And postoffice didn’t deal
at all with that input, and would transpose the CR and the character
immediately preceding it.
This made for some interesting results when the offending mail contained a url, which ended up having the last character clipped off and put on the next line.
I finally snapped and tried to correct this defect this last week.
At first, I thought that I’d just completely miscoded the state machine,
so I discarded it and put in a far simpler bit of code that does the same
thing, but I was still getting naked CRs from these mailers. And,
since it was no longer transposing the CR and the last character,
some mail readers (like Apple’s Mail.app)
decided that this meant that the whole mail message was lots of additional
headers.
*sigh*
After spending some time trying to outguess these mailers, I finally gave
up and redid the data() function so that it would silently discard
all CRs it found in the input stream. Yes, it’s not very
RFC-compliant, but it ends up with a larger body of mail that shows up
at pell and is actually readable.
So that’s as good a reason as any for some New Code!,
don’t you think? I’m sure there’s some pathological case
out there like someone doing an accounts-receivable system in
whitespace who also uses postoffice,
but sends plaintext copies of their code around for review. (This would
be the imaginary language whitespace++, which uses CR as a magic
“I am a class” marker)) where this will fail horribly, but, please,
if you’re it, give me a couple of days before reporting the defect.)