RSS support in Cyrus

[Dave McMurtrie]

Good day,

We've been tasked by our management with providing RSS support in Cyrus. 
 Fortunately, the Cyrus httpd server that was recently developed makes 
this much less onerous of a task.

The good news is that we're adding a new feature to Cyrus that I think 
people will like.  Our motivation is to provide a method by which our 
Exchange users may still make use of the many bulletin boards we offer 
via our Cyrus IMAP service without the need to configure a separate 
client.  Outlook has a perfectly functional RSS reader built in.

The bad news is that we've been given a fairly limited amount of time to 
roll this into production here at Carnegie Mellon University, which 
means we won't have a ton of time to solicit feedback and share design 
ideas with the rest of the Cyrus development community.  Even in 
speaking with Bron over IRC, I know there are some things he'd like to 
see in our code that will definitely not be there for the initial 
roll-out.  I think we can deal with this by getting a barebones 
implementation in place for our December production date, and then we 
can improve on it over time with community feedback.

The other issue that we need to address is which version this will 
ultimately be released with.  It will simplify our work if Ken can 
develop for the 2.4 codebase, so that's likely the route we're going to 
take.  We don't have CalDAV listed on the roadmap until 2.6, but the RSS 
code is based on the work Ken already did for CalDAV support. 
Essentially, to make RSS available, we're going to be using an httpd 
server that has WebDAV and CalDAV extensions built in. Full calendar 
support is not going to be ready by December, 2011 when the RSS code is 
ready.  Should this eventually be part of a 2.4.x release?  Should it 
wait until 2.5 or 2.6?  Should we (CMU) keep this as a separate branch 
for now?

Finally, we need to get this item added to the Cyrus Roadmap.  As a 
member of the community at large, I'm proposing that we add RSS support 
to Cyrus.  Can we get a vote by the core developers and the governance 
board?  Please let me know if this shall be added to the roadmap and if 
so, which version we can release it with.

Thanks,

Dave