Re: for Pantomime/GNUMail users - fixes and speedup

Hi Riccardo and Lars,

On 2026-04-30 02:05:30 +0200 Riccardo Mottola 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Steppers,
> 
> to whom uses Pantomime and GNUMail.
> 
> While debugging a completely unrelated issue with Lars about Menus in 
> GNUMail, I encountered some unexpected exceptions with NSURLs. The 
> URL 
> highlighting code was doing some weird thing when identifying 
> potential URLs 
> especially noticeable in "fake" plain text emails, which are actually 
> converted HTML. The user did not notice anythign except that some 
> URLs where 
> not correctly highlighted or not with the correct path.
> Hower, the code was unsafe and not completely correct.
> I hope I fixed it. No more exceptions and URLs show up fine in all my 
> test 
> mails.
> 
> Also by pure chance, I was looking at two very low-level methods in 
> Panomime 
> which write and read 32bit types from the cache and noticed that they 
> were 
> not paired in read/write with htonl() ntohl(). That is endianness was 
> converted twice in the same direction instead of back an forward when 
> writing 
> and reading to the cache, the format of which is meant to be 
> architecture 
> independent.
> 
> I corrected this, a decade or more old bug. You may need to delete 
> your cache 
> files and they will be automatically rebuild. The format is network 
> format, 
> i.e. BigEndian, so this bug actually affects the current majority of 
> LE 
> users.  for BE users htonl and ntohl are NO-OPs.
> 
> I found out now that GNUMail is much faster and responsive when 
> displaying 
> emails ant it is noticeably more responsive while skimming through 
> many 
> emails even in a busy folder. Furthermore, the ocasional haning while 
> display 
> certain emails (often spam emails) seem to have disappeared.
> 
> The result is a quite noticeable speedup for me. Even on the aging 
> laptop I 
> am writing off now, an Athlon 64 (single-core 2Ghz), I am reading 
> emails with 
> the CPU conveniently throttled to 1GHz, silent fans and still hav 
> very quick 
> mail switching. Wonderful! And I have tens of thousands of emails in 
> my 
> account.
> 
> Possibly errors and exceptions were hidden and caused inefficiencies 
> and 
> occasional misdisplays.
> 
> I won't say it is perfect now, but much better! please try svn HEAD 
> of 
> pantomime and GNUMail, best with current GNUstep base & gui of course.

That was done: it works greatly on my pi 500.
Thanks for the work done.

> 
> I will soon test off-mainstream platforms like Raspberry, old SPARCs 
> and old 
> computers to see how it behaves even on a SparcStations. I am really 
> curious.
> First tests on a Fire v120 (650Mhz UltraSPARC-IIe) show amazing 
> improvements 
> in terms of stability and speed.
> 
> Effects on other apps [*] like LuserNET need to be determined.
> 
> Riccardo
> 
> [*] I am not aware of oher Pantomime based apps beyond GNUMal and 
> LuserNET. 
> Are there?
> 

Cheers,
Patrick

-- 
Patrick Cardona - Pi500 - GNU/Linux aarch64 (Debian 13.4)
Xorg (1:7.7+24) - libcairo2 (1.18.4-1+rpt1 arm64) - Window Maker 
(0.96.0-4)
GWorkspace (1.1.0 - 02 2025) - Theme: AGNOSTEP - MUA: GNUMail (1.4.0 - 
last svn rev.)