Rebuild the World!
Once in a dead end, begin with some steps backwards
Mon Nov 17 14:14:48 2025 UTC
This is one of the things I'd definitely do if I only had a bit more time. I publish this proposal in the hope I'm not the only person in the world who can do this and who understands why this is important. This page's contents is merely a suggestion for those who likes the basic principles of the RebuildWorld project and wishes to do some free software in plain C.
Petidomo is a mailing list engine written by Peter Simons in plain C. The name is perhaps a word play for majordomo, which was (in the 1990s) perhaps the most popular mailing list engine, but is now abandoned for long (since 2000; well, it doesn't really matter as it was written in Perl). For more information on petidomo, see:
It is licensed with GPLv3, which is not very good, but not fatal either. The project seems to be unmaintained since 2019.
Mailing lists are perhaps the most important type of group forums for free software developers (as well as for general public, despite they aren't very popular nowadays). Unfortunately, most of the existing mailing list engines are written in scripting languages such as Perl and Python, which is inacceptable. Petidomo is the only mailing list engine written in C.
As of present, the build depends on external libraries and uses a lot of extra tools, including autoconf/automake, libtool, lexx and yacc, so it takes too much effort to build it from the sources.
The top priority is to bundle the sources with all external libraries needed to build it and to get rid of the damn GNU Libtool. Once this is done, the thing will perhaps deserve to be published; please see the next section for some suggestions on the publishing.
The next step is perhaps to get rid of the 'configure' script and of all traces of those autoconf/automake.
The last proposed step may be the most tricky, because it will envolve some coding. The existing dependency on Lexx and Yacc is obviously inappropriate, specially for parsing a thing as simple as an rfc822 message. Hence, the parser generated with those tools must be replaced with a hand-coded one.
It is possible the sources will need some cosmetic cleanup such as breaking long lines; honestly, I didn't check.
First of all, please be prepared to the fact you'll need to maintain the project for long. If you're not sure you can, perhaps you'd better not start with it at all. It is doubtful the original author will be interested in what we (you) do, so don't expect any help (but it might be worth trying to contact the author anyway).
It would be unfair to pretend the thing you create is still a (newer version of) petidomo, so the name must be changed. Certainly the due credit is to be given to the original author and the original software project: in all texts devoted to the new version it must be clearly stated the new thing is "based on petidomo written by Peter Simons". As of the new name, it's completely your choice, but please keep in mind the obvious 'minordomo' is already taken, and even several times (well... may be something like notadomo, I mean Not-a-domo? or even listvalet, heh; okay, it's all up to you).
At lease a simple single-page web site must be created for the project, and it must not have anything to do with those "free repository hostings" such as github, gitlab, sourceforge or the like. If this is problematic for you, feel free to contact me, I'll try to help.
Thanks!