Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2002 19:50:45 -0500
Subject: [gopher] Re: Pygopherd in background
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From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
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On Thursday, April 4, 2002, at 07:08  PM, Clint Paden wrote:

> pygopherd is working great for me so far, I enjoy the improvements.
> However, I do not know all that much about Python. What I would like to

Take a look at www.python.org.

> know is is there any way to run pygopherd in the background or as a
> daemon of some sort? If so how? If not, can it in the future? Also, what

That capability is not natively present in pygopherd at this time, but 
it will be.  In the meantime, you can just run:

./pygopherd &

The & will put it in the background.

> was the rationale for writing it in python as opposed to C or something
> more commonplace (relatively)? Thanks!

Several things.  For one, Python provided a lot of useful libraries and 
utilites.  It comes with a nice library for figuring out MIME types, for 
instance.  Python also is not vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks, one 
of the most common security problems in C code.  Python also has a very 
nice OO system, meaning that a modular architecture is quite easily 
possible.  Several pygopherd classes inherit from each other, and the 
HandlerMultiplexer and ProtocolMultiplexer classes have a lot of power, 
not all of which is being used yet.  I'm planning to implement virtual 
folders, which will essentially nest a HandlerMultiplexer with its own 
root and/or config inside an existing system.  Will be great for mirrors 
with their own .Links files referring to / on the system or for ones 
where you'd rather just turn off standard MIME type checking and make 
everything a text file even if it ends in .gif...

-- John