Re: Aging Dependencies?

Awhile back, Ken Hornstein <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Anyone heard of plans regarding what to do about aging
>> dependencies for exmh?  I'm trying to bring a Fedora 16 machine
>> up to capable, which includes installing exmh.
>> I found metamail for Fedora 16 on-line, maybe it was at pkgs.net?

> MacPorts includes a "mmencode" package which has the piece you
> really need (you don't really need all of metamail).  There's a
> built-in base64 encoder/decoder in exmh, but there is a file
> descriptor leak in there somewhere; I never was able to track it
> down and installing mmencode was just easier.  Perhaps one of us
> should consider creating an RPM for that?

FWIW, I ran into this while moving onto a new machine running RHEL6.
I didn't really want to install metamail, but pulling up any large
base64-encoded or qp-encoded message was just horribly slow.  I went
looking in the exmh source code and almost immediately stumbled
across this changelog entry:

cvs repository 06/20/2008 [email protected]
  lib/seditExtras.tcl, lib/mime.tcl: patch from Marion Hakanson to
   fix fd leakage in internal mime qp/base64 decoder
   patch from debian: add support for recode as alternative to mimencode

Sure enough, installing recode (which *is* available as a RHEL or Fedora
package) and restarting exmh fixed the speed problem.  So that seems
like an alternative worth keeping in mind.  A bit of looking says that
recode hasn't seen an upstream release in a long while either, but
maybe it's just one of those pieces of software that doesn't need
many changes.

			regards, tom lane