executing scripts after receiving a fax
Hi,
before the real start: This mail is sent to two mailing lists.
mgetty@... is the mgetty-mailinglist, debian-mentors a list for
getting good ideas from within the Debian project; please send answers
also to both lists (and there is no need to Cc me, as I'm subscribed
to both lists). The goal of this mail is to get a framework to for
handling incoming faxes by different scripts (see below), and
constructing this framework in a way that it is usable inside and
outside debian. I don't want to do anything that would break this on
any OS, but I also don't want to do anything that would it make hard
to follow debians policies.
Now to content:
After a new fax is received, currently a single file is executed, and
(independent of that) mail sent to the one certain user (mostly to the
system-administrator). I want to have a plug-able framework, where a
lot of scripts can sit in, and get executed after a fax is received.
This should also be scalable to receiving faxes at different phone
numbers, and handling them different.
My current proposal is to create scripts (sitting in @LIBDIR@) that
could do the necessary transformations to a new fax, and to create a
directory (in @CONFDIR@) that could contain symlinks or even (in more
complex setups) small shell scripts that call the right script(s), and
perhaps change some arguments to them, according to recipient number,
... After receiving a fax, the scripts are executed with something
like run-parts (execute each script in lexical order in a given
directory), and failure or success are logged.
For the API I'm currently undecided. The one existing script get
currently the some options via command line interface, and other via
environment. It would be IMHO much easier if environment would be
specified as the standard way to pass options (as this would it make
_really_ easy to e.g. overwrite mail recipient addresses). Any opinion
on this, and should I use a standard-prefix to variable names (e.g.
"RECEIVED_FAX_...")?
We have (for all programms) at least the values of the senders number
(via the phone), senders code (via fax protocol), recipients number,
number of received pages, hangup code, and the pages. Some programms
could also allow to override e.g. a recipients mail address, so they
may have even more options.
One last (but more easily) question is open: What programms should
exist? Create a mail with the fax as png, a mail with pdf, a automatic
print-out? Any more?
I hope my proposal is clear, and would like to receive comments and
suggestions on this. Thank you for your time for reading (and maybe
even answering) my mail.
Cheers,
Andi
--
http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/
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