On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 12:14:36AM +0530, Manish Jethani wrote:
Well, actually, having a Java interpreter would be a lot cleaner than writing all your s/w in C/C++. Programs like Gautam's are better written (and maintained!) in Java. That's why Java (or Perl, or some other high-level language) exists!
Gautam's program is something with very basic functionality; it is like an enhanced fetchmail (I haven't tried JFetch yet. I downloaded it but I don't yet have JVM). Many more people would accept it if it could be converted into a standalone binary.
open-source community. Lots and lots of business s/w has been written (and, recently, ported) to Java. At least one Free JRE would come bundled with most Linux distros.
And what about those thousands of machines which had GNU/Linux or BSD or ... installed long before todays fancy Linux distros were available? JFetch is not a business s/w and its use is not limited to some organizations.
Also, as pointed out by Tahir, "lot cleaner" is something the programmer or maintainer is concerned with, who, anyway, is used to working with that complexity. For a user, it's cleaner if he can execute it with ./JFetch without any unnecessary virtual machine comming in between.
Since JFetch is an enhancement to fetchmail and not radically different from fetchmail, I feel that instead of writing a totally new software, a patch to fetchmail would be more helpful. ESR should be told about this (It's possible that Gautam has already had a correspondence with ESR). If he refuses to include this functionality for some reason, then a new software is worth. Having the functionality added to fetchmail would also mean that users would just have to upgrade their existing fetchmail and add the new options to the existing fetchmail configuration file.
Ultimately it is Gautam's choice. Is there any way to convert the java byte code to native code binary? If there is, then those binaries could be distributed, and people like me, who don't have JVM, could start using it right away.