> >I don't care about one application either: I care about violating > >a basic decades-old useful convention of the Unix operating system: > > Didn't you just tell me that "Too much /really bad/ software has been > created by praying to the false God of backward compatibility..."? :-)
Yes, exactly; what's your point? I'm advocating that we abandon backward compatibility here (that is, the ability of newer versions of the server to read the old dot-named folders) to serve an entirely different purpose: following convention. > This again falls in the realm of an application that is interpreting Binc's > structures in a manner inconsistent with how Binc interprets them. If your > tool can't easily switch between one view and another, then your tool is > broken, not BincIMAP. The tool follows the convention; BINC IMAP doesn't. Why is this a hard convept for you? Do you not agree that the "." convention exists in Unix, is very old, and very useful? If an app with 40 users does something inconsistent with 100 apps used by thousands, it's pretty clear to me who's "broken". > This is the heart of our difference of opinion, you consider it to be a bug > to prepend folders with '.', I don't. I encourage you to write a patch > that makes the path separator configurable. It has nothing to do with the path separator: that can still be ".", and I'm happy. The server just shouldn't create folders named with a ".", and that's a completely separate and unrelated issue to the separator. > I would rather time be spent on furthering Binc's IMAP conformance than > accomodating other software's interpretation of reality. That's what I'm arguing for here: conformance. And not just to RFCs, although that's a good starting point. It should also conform to user expectations about the way software works in Unix. That "other software" was here first. It is our job to conform to them, not the other way around. The primary attribute of usable software is /humility/. The world is littered with the carcasses of "good ideas"; the software that people actually use is the software that plays well with others. -- Lee Daniel Crocker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
