[MacPerl] Porting Majordomo

[Brian McNett <brianmc@telebyte.net>]

I find myself in a situation.  On the Mac, if you want a listserver you 
have two options: good, and free.  ListStar is good. Very, very good 
indeed.  However, you pay $200 for access to that goodness.

Macjordomo is free.  Cheezy-free, but free.  Feature-poor, but free.  My 
initial encounter with setting up a list in Macjordomo (which bears no 
relation at all to the real Majordomo, just a similar name), has peeved 
me enough that I blurted out (in the presense of Jon Singer (who is more 
awsomely connected than anyone I know), which frequently produces 
unforseen side-effects), something to the effect that Majordomo itself is 
written mostly (er... entirely I've since discovered) in Perl, and how it 
would be nice even if there were some way to assess the feasibility of 
porting it.  I'd mentioned the possibility eariler, and Jon says 
something along the lines of "I know Brent Chapman, but I *didn't* know 
Majordomo was written in Perl!"

So, here are the reasons for porting Majordomo to MacPerl:

1)  Bragging rights (it will look very good on someone's resume)

2)  The Mac *needs* the REAL Majordomo, and it needs it BADLY.  Email is 
*the*
    killer app, and Majordomo is the catagory-killer when it comes to 
handling
    email lists.

3)  *I* need the real Majordomo.  It's nice to have a personal stake in 
something.

4)  Unix wonks shouldn't have *all* the fun.  It's great to steal other 
people's
    thunder.

5)  from http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/

    Majordomo was developed under UNIX based systems, but will probably
    work on others. If you can get Perl to compile and run cleanly on your
    system, and can send Internet mail by piping or calling an external 
program
    (and that external program reads its list of recipients from a plain 
text
    file), you can probably get Majordomo to work on a wide variety of 
UNIX-based
    and non-UNIX based systems. 

    (therefore porting is encouraged!)

6)  Why not?

Here's my pitch:  I'm not a fantastic Perl programmer.  Occasionally I 
can get Perl to do exactly what I want, and I'm happy with that. It's far 
more than I've ever been capable of in any other programming language 
(except for some Z-80 machine code stuff I did ages ago).  I personally 
don't have the skill to consider porting Majordomo on my own.  However, 
the need is there, the possibility exists, and by GHOD I dare this thing 
*NOT* to happen!  If anyone wishes to make an assesment of Majordomo from 
the standpoint of getting it up and running under MacPerl, I'd be glad to 
hear the results.  If someone want's to set up a mailing list (oh how 
wonderfully recursive!) for a specific discussion of the porting process, 
I'd be glad to hear from you also.

I feel this is important.  I'd like to see it happen.  Whatever humble 
contribution my modest skills allow, I will gladly put toward making it 
so, taking only such credit as befits my aformentioned modest ability.  
However, if no one else is interested, it just ain't gunna happen folks!  
As I doubt that much of what needs doing is on-topic for this list, 
please post to me off-list.  Comments, etc. are also welcome.

--Brian

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