[Mono-list] Re: Contributing non .NET libraries

[Miguel de Icaza]

> Over the past few weeks, I've been developing Theoreality .NETMail, a
> library of mail functionality for .NET.  It provides full messaging
> functionality, SMTP client and server functionality, POP client and
> server functionality, working on IMAP, etc., etc.  Future direction is
> to integrate with Instant Messenging, NNTP News, Calendaring, etc.
> Layered on top are user mail services such as Spam avoidance, rules
> processing and the like

Very nice!  I would like to know more about this.  It seems like this is
complementary to the work that Gaurav was proposing.  .NETMail seems to
be a transport/delivery mechanism, while Gaurav's is more of a Mime/RFC
framework for creating/extracting these messages.

Is this the case?

> What I'd like to know is if Mono is interested in getting .NETMail as
> part of the Mono .NET framework.  Related to that, currently the
> System.Web.Mail classes are self-contained... They handle messaging and
> SMTP communications within the library, but they could be easily
> modified to utilize .NETMail.

Sure, I would love to know more about this.  

If we were to use .NETMail, I can only foresee a problem with adding the
dependency in Mono: it would make it harder for people that are trying
to compile Mono.  We can find alternatives (for example, we could 
mirroring the code in one cvs tree to the other).

As I suggested Gaurav, for any code that is not part of the Microsoft
API, we should create extra assemblies.  It is perfectly fine if our
assemblies do depend on the extra ones.

So for example, we will have another extra assembly with the WebServer
classes (do not know the exact name ;-) and .NETmail and Gaurav's work.
They can all be elements that we use internally.

If someone wants to use the API directly from their application, they
can just use reference them (/r:dotnetmail.dll, /r:webserver), but
always working on both Windows and Mono.

For now, I think that having a standalone system will simplify the
deployment in the Mono CVS (until we figure out how you want to publish
the code)

> Anyway, I'm new to mono and not quite sure of the protocol for
> contributing.  Is this something anyone would care to have as part of
> Mono?  

Check:

	http://www.go-mono.com/ccvs.html

For details on getting your CVS account.

Miguel