On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Caskey Dickson, apparently hot and bothered, wrote: > See, that was my point, trying to conform to the dot convention is trying to > maintain compatibility for compatibility's sake, without regard to the utility > or the situation at hand. > > You view the dot as a path separator (and therefore a prefix for subfolders of > INBOX) as a broken feature of Binc, I view it as a compatible feature with > other IMAP servers (specifically the Courier that Binc-Is-Not-), thus enabling > Binc to be a drop-in replacement.
If we were happy with Courier we wouldn't be here, right? I started this thread, so please allow me to reiterate my original question - why can't I create a folder called "foo"? > If Binc were to eliminate dot prefixed subfolders of INBOX, then Binc will no > longer be a replacement for Courier. Leaving aside for the moment the on-disk storage structure, does Courier have this restriction - that one can only create folders called "INBOX.xxx"? [Excuse my ignorance - I've thus far found Courier-IMAP be too big a pill to swallow in a single sitting, and have struggled with patching maildir patches of WU-imapd for my sins.] > This leaves three distinct options: > > 1) Maintain compatibility with Courier IMAP for subfolders of INBOX > 2) Break compatibility with Courier IMAP by changing the path separator > 3) Do both via some kind of configuration mechanism I'd be happy for 3). I have no interest in conforming with Mr Sam's conventions, but don't wish to prevent you from doing so. As I see it, this can all be done with three configuration items - path separator, path to INBOX maildir, root dir of non-INBOX folder tree. My preference is for these to be '/', ~/Maildir/, ~/Mail/, but I'm happy for you to have whatever you want. > > 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 think you're not noticing that .foo.bar is "INBOX.foo.bar", thus it is the > separator we are in fact talking about. Why isn't it "foo.bar"? And how is the client to know that folders must begin with "INBOX."? > >>I would rather time be spent on furthering Binc's IMAP conformance than > >>accomodating other software's interpretation of reality. As long as it conforms with Courier's interpretation of reality, eh? :-) > And what I'm arguing for here is that the notion of changing something that > already works to make it work differently (but as you insist, better), is > secondary to making Binc comply with the IMAP protocol which allows for root > folders. RFC 2060 doesn't help us here - "The interpretation of mailbox names is implementation-dependent". This includes, as far as I can tell, any decision on what is and is not a legal mailbox name. > Changing something that works is not as important as adding something that is > missing. But does BINC work? I want a folder called "foo", and I can't have one. Yet! But I'm confident that is about to change :-) > Better the hard truth than the comforting fantasy. -- Carl Sagan [Hmm, so why chase the needle in a trillion haystacks of SETI, Carl?] -- Charlie
