On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Rob Siemborski wrote:
> I suppose this depends on your definition of harmless.  I wouldn't want a
> server that doesn't do this declared at all noncompliant.

Agreed; there is no harm in not doing this if the server does not have
have such a thing as a \NoSelect name without children.  Such servers
aren't noncompliant (sorry for the double negative).

But we do have to consider the case when a server has \NoSelect names
without children.

> I do not believe it is harmless in pathological cases like LIST "*/%"
> where the output could be needlessly doubled by such behavior.  Of course,
> this is a pathological case.

I don't think that we need to consider pathological cases; a client which
invoked this gets what it deserves.

> Indeed, I'd argue such a server (which does not have the \NoSelect with no
> children case) is equally correct with an implementation that does not
> omit foo/ from the list, since none of this special treatment of trailing
> hierarchy delimiters (outside of CREATE) is discussed in the protocol
> specifications.

That is a problem; doing so creates ambiguity and misleads clients into
incorrect behavior.  We should not be recklessly making IMAP more
ambiguous and less useful.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

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