[Users] That won't work.

[Dragony]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 18:52:14 +0100 Jeremy Nicoll (jn.ml.clwm.729 at letterboxes.org) wrote:

>On Tue, 13 Oct 2020, at 18:08, Dragony wrote:
>> ...  I would just drop shell execution support completely and tell 
>> people to use a much simpler command syntax like:
>> 
>> |invoke_header(/your/tool) ;Invokes /your/tool and gives the mail 
>> header data to STDIN.
>> 
>> |invoke_pointer(/your/tool) ;Invokes /your/tool and gives the full path 
>> to the locally stored mail file as the first argument.  
>
>The only disadvantage of those methods - which (I'd agree with for
>more complex scripts) is that they have two disadvantages
>
> 1. that the script writer has to parse either all the headers, or 
>    the entire mail ... which may be beyond the ability of some 
>    users

I agree. Paul might state that this feature is meant for power users only :)
Seriously, how else could you support shell invocation, which requires quoted variables at least, and give a user the opportunity to concatenate strings when they are already quoted and the program invoked does not support multiple arguments? Is there a shell operator concatenating strings to be given as one argument? And well.... if users are concatenating strings, aren't they already power users? Honestly, I would say everyone using such functions is a power user idk...

> 2. that that's bound to be slow, and loses the advantage that 
>    Claws has already parsed them

"Slow" is relative. I have not measured it, but from my experiences the biggest overhead is actually invoking a program. Especially when it is a Perl script. So the additional overhead for sending something to STDIN should be a tiny fraction.

Furthermore we are talking about a client software, not a mail server. When a program is executed as soon as the user is clicking reply, you already need to wait around 150ms until the window is open. I don't see a problem when it takes 151ms. Its probably even less. I haven't actually measured it in this actual case though, but in other similar cases I did.

But after all my solution was just a suggestion.

- Dragony