Re: [Exim] Non-numeric variables in filters

On Tue, May 23, 2000 at 09:36:43AM +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Mon, 22 May 2000, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:
>
> > > What I personally would really like to see is the exim equivalent of
> > > mod_perl for apache - pretty much full exposure of the internals.
> >
> > Personally, I'd rather see embedded Python, but I agree in general
> > with Nigel and Michael.
>
> The performance of an embedded scripting language may cause problems. It
> occurs to me that if I were to make it possible to link a C function
> with Exim, then you could either write your stuff in C (regex handling
> is already there using PCRE) or you could escape from C to Perl or
> (presumably) Python, or anything else.

I wouldn't want to burden anyone with the additional overhead of a
embedded scripting language that didn't need it. However, I'm sure
that those people that need the functionality of an embedded scripting
language would either live with the performance loss or throw more
hardware at the problem.

Now that I've had more time to think about it, I'd rather see an
Apache-style API implemented rather than embedding a specific
scripting language.

> The problem, of course, is specifying the interface.

I think that the first step would be to draw up a complete flow chart
that describes how exim processes mail and the information exim needs
to make decisions at each point.

Unfortunately, I don't have the familiarity with the code that would
be needed to draw up such a flow chart, but I'd be willing to draw up
a prettified final product based upon ascii diagrams sent to me.

Jeff