On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 12:14:36AM +0530, Manish Jethani wrote:
Well, actually, having a Java interpreter would be a
lot cleaner
than writing all your s/w in C/C++. Programs like Gautam's are
better written (and maintained!) in Java. That's why Java (or
Perl, or some other high-level language) exists!
Gautam's program is something with very basic functionality; it is
like an enhanced fetchmail (I haven't tried JFetch yet. I downloaded
it but I don't yet have JVM). Many more people would accept it if it
could be converted into a standalone binary.
open-source community. Lots and lots of business s/w
has been
written (and, recently, ported) to Java. At least one Free JRE
would come bundled with most Linux distros.
And what about those thousands of machines which had GNU/Linux or BSD
or ... installed long before todays fancy Linux distros were
available? JFetch is not a business s/w and its use is not limited to
some organizations.
Also, as pointed out by Tahir, "lot cleaner" is something the
programmer or maintainer is concerned with, who, anyway, is used to
working with that complexity. For a user, it's cleaner if he can
execute it with ./JFetch without any unnecessary virtual machine
comming in between.
Since JFetch is an enhancement to fetchmail and not radically
different from fetchmail, I feel that instead of writing a totally new
software, a patch to fetchmail would be more helpful. ESR should be
told about this (It's possible that Gautam has already had a
correspondence with ESR). If he refuses to include this functionality
for some reason, then a new software is worth. Having the
functionality added to fetchmail would also mean that users would just
have to upgrade their existing fetchmail and add the new options to
the existing fetchmail configuration file.
Ultimately it is Gautam's choice. Is there any way to convert the
java byte code to native code binary? If there is, then those
binaries could be distributed, and people like me, who don't have JVM,
could start using it right away.
--
Abhir Joshi
http://education.vsnl.com/abhir/