MUA written in Haskell (was: Getting GHC to print "Done" when it's finished linking?)

newer
Re: Library survey results

older
haskell-prime traffic

Nils Anders Danielsson

8 Mar 2006 8 Mar '06

10:44 a.m.

On Tue, 07 Mar 2006, "Brian Hulley" wrote: (Moved from ghc-users.)

...

Brian Hulley wrote:

...

(time for a proper email client to be written in Haskell! ;-) )

I had the same thought yesterday, after an Emacs-Lisp session in which I was trying to get Gnus to do exactly what I wanted it to... Out of curiosity, how much work would it take to write an easily configurable, decent MUA in Haskell? I don't know too much about MUAs, but I have a feeling that we already have quite a few libraries that are needed for the job: UIs (including HTML rendering...), plugins, various protocols, encryption... -- /NAD

Show replies by date

Shae Matijs Erisson

8 Mar 8 Mar

12:35 p.m.

New subject: MUA written in Haskell, and MTA in Haskell help?

Nils Anders Danielsson writes:

...

I had the same thought yesterday, after an Emacs-Lisp session in which I was trying to get Gnus to do exactly what I wanted it to...

Yeah, same here. I use Gnus and it's nice, but occasionally I want to erase it from the timestream.

...

Out of curiosity, how much work would it take to write an easily configurable, decent MUA in Haskell? I don't know too much about MUAs, but I have a feeling that we already have quite a few libraries that are needed for the job: UIs (including HTML rendering...), plugins, various protocols, encryption...

It wouldn't be too hard. I'd suggest you start with Tuomo Valkonen's Riot[1] and go for something like mutt. I'm sure you could steal lots of useful code from Peter Simons' Postmaster[2]. Speaking of which, I've tried to use Postmaster for my own personal domain, ScannedInAvian.com, but I've had various difficulties. Is anyone else using it for their domain? I'd like to find anti-spam features that match those of postfix, like greylisting, dns name checks, etc. [1] http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/riot/ [2] http://postmaster.cryp.to/ -- I've tried to teach people autodidactism, | ScannedInAvian.com but it seems they always have to learn it for themselves.| Shae Matijs Erisson

dons＠cse.unsw.edu.au

9 Mar 9 Mar

3:24 a.m.

New subject: MUA written in Haskell, and MTA in Haskell help?

shae:

...

Nils Anders Danielsson writes:

...
I had the same thought yesterday, after an Emacs-Lisp session in which I was trying to get Gnus to do exactly what I wanted it to...

Yeah, same here. I use Gnus and it's nice, but occasionally I want to erase it from the timestream.

...
Out of curiosity, how much work would it take to write an easily configurable, decent MUA in Haskell? I don't know too much about MUAs, but I have a feeling that we already have quite a few libraries that are needed for the job: UIs (including HTML rendering...), plugins, various protocols, encryption...

It wouldn't be too hard. I'd suggest you start with Tuomo Valkonen's Riot[1] and go for something like mutt. I'm sure you could steal lots of useful code from Peter Simons' Postmaster[2].

Interestingly -- some may not know this -- I originally wrote hs-plugins to provide Haskell configuration and extension to a planned mutt-like MUA in Haskell :) If I was actually going to write one now, I'd start with hmp3 for the fast, portable curses ui and keystroke handling, and steal the mbox parsing code from riot. You'd have something working in a day or two, I'd reckon -- all the code is out there, it just needs to be assembled. -- Don

Brian Hulley

8 Mar 8 Mar

7:52 p.m.

New subject: MUA written in Haskell (was: Getting GHC to print "Done" when it's finished linking?)

Nils Anders Danielsson wrote:

...

On Tue, 07 Mar 2006, "Brian Hulley" wrote:

(Moved from ghc-users.)

...
Brian Hulley wrote:

...
(time for a proper email client to be written in Haskell! ;-) )

I had the same thought yesterday, after an Emacs-Lisp session in which I was trying to get Gnus to do exactly what I wanted it to...

Out of curiosity, how much work would it take to write an easily configurable, decent MUA in Haskell? I don't know too much about MUAs, but I have a feeling that we already have quite a few libraries that are needed for the job: UIs (including HTML rendering...), plugins, various protocols, encryption...

I'm afraid I don't know much about MUAs either. I see there's some stuff in Network.* that may be useful... Unfortunately I don't have time at the moment to try implementing one, but for what it's worth here are some thoughts I had on what an "ideal" email client, suitable for Haskell programmers, would be like: 1) Plain text based to avoid problems with viruses etc getting in via HTML. HTML emails received could just be displayed as plain text (including all markup) 2) "What-you-see-is-exactly-what-will-be-sent" for editing, so that when you press "send" you don't need to worry about the text being all mangled up by wrapping/replacement of characters etc 3) When you click "reply" or "reply all", the original text should be indented with '>' (at the moment OE requires QuoteFix to achieve this trivial but essential functionality) 4) An API could be exposed then the user could write scripts to put things into correct folders etc. The API could provide info about what is currently waiting on the server, and the ability to download or delete without downloading (eg for big attachments that are suspected of being viruses) 5) Ideally the scripting language would be Haskell. There is already stuff in Language.Haskell.* for doing parsing but I can't find anything which would allow you to compile and load functions into a running program. So I'd imagine that the email client would contain a plain text editor that wrapped text as it is edited (if wrapping is needed nowadays anyway?) with email addresses and URLs in the text clickable; a tree of folders and a folder contents window which could display the emails by date/subject/name/ or thread; and an API and way of loading scripts written in Haskell to do all the complicated automatic stuff - which would now be completely under the user's control. Regards, Brian.

dons＠cse.unsw.edu.au

9 Mar 9 Mar

3:30 a.m.

New subject: MUA written in Haskell (was: Getting GHC to print "Done" when it's finished linking?)

...

5) Ideally the scripting language would be Haskell..

...

... I can't find anything which would allow you to compile and load functions into a running program.

...

From haskell.org: "hs-plugins" A library for compiling and loading plugins into a running Haskell program.

Have a look at: "Dynamic Applications From the Ground Up". Stewart and Chakravarty, 2005 "Plugging Haskell In". Pang, Stewart, Seefried, and Chakravarty, 2004 :) Cheers, Don

Bulat Ziganshin

7:27 a.m.

New subject: MUA written in Haskell (was: Getting GHC to print "Done" when it's finished linking?)

Hello Brian, Wednesday, March 8, 2006, 10:52:28 PM, you wrote: BH> 4) An API could be exposed then the user could write scripts to put things BH> into correct folders etc. BH> 5) Ideally the scripting language would be Haskell. There is already stuff that's whole idea is similar to emacs, only with Haskell instead of Lisp. btw, there is one such project - hIDE. although it is stalled now afaik, it looks like good starting point for what you want -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

Matthias Fischmann

8:30 a.m.

New subject: MUA written in Haskell (was: Getting GHC to print "Done" when it's finished linking?)

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 07:52:28PM -0000, Brian Hulley wrote:

...

To: Nils Anders Danielsson Cc: Haskell Cafe From: Brian Hulley Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 19:52:28 -0000 Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Re: MUA written in Haskell (was: Getting GHC to print "Done" when it's finished linking?)

Nils Anders Danielsson wrote:

...
On Tue, 07 Mar 2006, "Brian Hulley" wrote:

[...] [...]

5) Ideally the scripting language would be Haskell. There is already stuff in Language.Haskell.* for doing parsing but I can't find anything which would allow you to compile and load functions into a running program.

this would be cool, but i don't think it's very urgent. i would be perfectly happy with a config directory that is scanned for code every time i *recompile* my MUA. it's not gonna happen every day. and for those few people who like installshields and still want to plug in code that doesn't come with the distribution, the entire program could be shipped within ghci. i don't think this is a very resource-hungry application for modern hardware standards. nice wish list. corpus navigation is missing, though. a large topic, and i have lots of ideas too half-baked to put in writing. but you should give it a thought. m. ps: did anybody get the riot thing compiled with ghc-6.4? i have the feeling there are some changes in the packageing interface in one of the last ghc version shifts that bit me, and i was too distracted to figure it out. though i am really curious.

7060

Age (days ago)

7061

Last active (days ago)

List overview

Download

6 comments

6 participants

participants (6)

Brian Hulley
Bulat Ziganshin
dons＠cse.unsw.edu.au
Matthias Fischmann
Nils Anders Danielsson
Shae Matijs Erisson