Re: Request for comments: project proposal

Robert STRANDH <[email protected]> writes:

> The purpose of the project (let's call it "Mel") is to write an
> end-user email client using Common Lisp + CLIM (McCLIM).  

I'm itching to have a McCLIM-based program that I can use in daily
life, so this is very interesting.

An email client seems a bit thorny though:

  Gnus is already quite fantastic, and Emacs is a great vehicle for
  mail. (I think Gnus is much more popular for mail than VM these
  days, but I could be mistaken.)

  Email is "mission critical" -- it would be quite aggravating to
  lose access to my mail during times of program-under-development
  bugs.

  Email is heavily stateful. If Mel has all my mail in its Lisp image
  but isn't working, I can't easily fall back and read my mail in
  Gnus instead.

How about throwing the weight behind Gilbert's Closure browser
instead? The weaknesses of mail seem to be strengths of the web:

  No full-featured browser will be written in Elisp for at least ten
  years, say. Probably never.

  None of the full-featured browsers have "Emacs nature", nor do they
  seem likely to get it.

  The client web is quite stateless -- if one browser isn't working I
  can happily fall back on another for a few days or for some specific
  pages.

Closure is also in a pretty amazingly advanced state.

Just a thought.

-Luke