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Hello everyone.
Today's the last day of Pycon 2009 sprints and I'm eager to return
home and see my family. Chris Withers and I had a good day sprinting
on the email package before he had to jet out, and although we only
closed one bug in Python 2.7 (this is where Chris's mantra "backport,
backport" begins :) we had a lot of good discussions about how and
where to fix outstanding problems in email.
I have lots of ideas on how to improve the email package. I plan on
creating a bit of space on the Python wiki to consolidate my thoughts
and to coordinate implementation. I'm hoping some of you will be
interested enough to help with design, testing, use cases, and coding.
We have a few older pages in the wiki covering the email package:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/EmailSigSprint
http://wiki.python.org/moin/EmailSprint
Some of this we've accomplished. Here's a rambling of some of my
thoughts on things we should do.
* Turn all header values into Header instances. It's difficult and
error prone to have to manage both strings and Headers as values, so
they should always be Header instances. We should add a registry of
Header subclasses, based on the lower cased header name, for allowing
higher level semantic folding of header strings.
* Implement a Message subclass registry for parsing. This would allow
the parser to create custom subclasses based on the Content-Type found
while parsing the message.
* Bytes and string interfaces. This is the trickiest one. I think
that internally, header names and values, and payloads should all be
represented as bytes. But APIs should accept bytes and strings,
converting to bytes on input, and provide APIs to extract information
as either bytes or strings. I've thought about a few ways to do this
cleanly, but haven't found anything I particularly like yet. Remember
that in email in Py2 is horribly broken in its discrimination between
bytes and strings, but Py3 forces us to make a choice (which is a good
thing).
* Clean up the API. Where possible, simple attribute access should be
the norm. Let's get rid of dumb API decisions (like str(msg)
including the Unix-From). Let's fix the whole
get_payload(decode=True) debacle. Let's fix stuff like needing to
specify unicode encodings twice in the same call. Etc.
* Add an external storage API so that messages with huge binary
payloads don't need to be fully stored in memory.
* Let's target Python 3.1 (coming very soon) if possible, or Python
3.2 if not. We should back port email 6.0 to Python 2.x, though we'll
have to decide how far back we should go (my suggestion: no earlier
than Python 2.5).
* Fix the myriad of bugs in the tracker!
That's it for now. I'll figure out a place in the wiki for this and
we can start capturing our thoughts there. One thing I've heard
pretty consistently is that while the email package has its problems,
it's one of the best email packages available for any language. Let's
make it rock.
Barry
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