[ELPA] Package proposal: gnus-mock

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Hi,

I've just pushed the branch scratch/gnus-mock to ELPA, containing a
package I'd like to add there.

It's called "Gnus Mock", and provides a dummy test installation for
Gnus, which you can use for working on Gnus features and testing Gnus
bugs without endangering your own Gnus setup. I'm hoping this makes it
easier to do work on Gnus -- it's often hard to hack on without a full
working installation, and no one wants to risk their own mail on that.

In a nutshell, you run M-x gnus-mock-start, which first copies a dummy
Gnus installation (including mails) into a temporary directory, boots up
a new "emacs -Q", and points all Gnus-related variables at the temporary
directory. You can start Gnus as usual, hack on whatever you like,
accidentally delete data, and when it all gets too messy you can just
kill the secondary Emacs, and start over afresh.

Two questions:

1. I find the data directory like so:

(defconst gnus-mock-data-dir
(file-name-as-directory (expand-file-name
"data"
(file-name-directory load-file-name)))
   "Source directory for Gnus mock data.")

   That seems to work fine, but I wanted to check there wasn't a
   better/safer way to do it.

2. There's a small Python script in there that acts as a dummy sendmail
   command: when you send an email from a Gnus mock installation, it
   hands it off to the Python script, which boomerangs it back to a
   folder in the local installation, so you can send yourself messages
   and see what they look like. The script is called with
   "#!/usr/bin/env python", which I assume will be fine for Unix-y
   platforms, but maybe not work for Windows. I'd like it to work for
   Windows -- does anyone have suggestions for a more portable way of
   doing this?


Future plans include more different pre-installed servers, including
checking for a "dovecot" executable and setting up an nnimap server if
it's found.

Comments very welcome!

Eric