Hi, before the real start: This mail is sent to two mailing lists. [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the mgetty-mailinglist, debian-mentors a list for getting good ideas from within the Debian project; please send answers also to both lists (and there is no need to Cc me, as I'm subscribed to both lists). The goal of this mail is to get a framework to for handling incoming faxes by different scripts (see below), and constructing this framework in a way that it is usable inside and outside debian. I don't want to do anything that would break this on any OS, but I also don't want to do anything that would it make hard to follow debians policies.
Now to content: After a new fax is received, currently a single file is executed, and (independent of that) mail sent to the one certain user (mostly to the system-administrator). I want to have a plug-able framework, where a lot of scripts can sit in, and get executed after a fax is received. This should also be scalable to receiving faxes at different phone numbers, and handling them different. My current proposal is to create scripts (sitting in @LIBDIR@) that could do the necessary transformations to a new fax, and to create a directory (in @CONFDIR@) that could contain symlinks or even (in more complex setups) small shell scripts that call the right script(s), and perhaps change some arguments to them, according to recipient number, ... After receiving a fax, the scripts are executed with something like run-parts (execute each script in lexical order in a given directory), and failure or success are logged. For the API I'm currently undecided. The one existing script get currently the some options via command line interface, and other via environment. It would be IMHO much easier if environment would be specified as the standard way to pass options (as this would it make _really_ easy to e.g. overwrite mail recipient addresses). Any opinion on this, and should I use a standard-prefix to variable names (e.g. "RECEIVED_FAX_...")? We have (for all programms) at least the values of the senders number (via the phone), senders code (via fax protocol), recipients number, number of received pages, hangup code, and the pages. Some programms could also allow to override e.g. a recipients mail address, so they may have even more options. One last (but more easily) question is open: What programms should exist? Create a mail with the fax as png, a mail with pdf, a automatic print-out? Any more? I hope my proposal is clear, and would like to receive comments and suggestions on this. Thank you for your time for reading (and maybe even answering) my mail. Cheers, Andi -- http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/ PGP 1024/89FB5CE5 DC F1 85 6D A6 45 9C 0F 3B BE F1 D0 C5 D1 D9 0C
