Uday Reddy wrote at 18:39 +0100 on Jul 16, 2014: > VM has traditionally shipped with C programs for MIME encoding/decoding. > Rob F created an entire Unix-like infrastructure (Make files, configure, > autoconf etc.) pretty much to handle just these. If we get rid of these C > programs, VM can be shipped just like any other emacs library. > > Both GNU Emacs and XEmacs now have built-in encoding/decoding functionality > for base64. So, we can use them. For the Quoted Printable format, > emacs-lisp seems to be fast enough. Gnus has been using it for ages and > everybody seems happy with that. > > So, I am thinking of getting rid of the C programs for MIME. Does anybody > see any problem with that? > > Cheers, > Uday > > (Coming back after a long hibernation)
We should check the performance of builtin decoding - particularly with larger messages on slower machines. That said, most of the unix flavors & cygwin out there now have one or more command line tools to en/decode base64 (less prevalent are qp tools) which can take the place of the vm versions: mmencode (both) mimencode (both) base64 b64en/decode qprint not to mention perl & python one liners.
