Hi, Dan :-)
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Dan Mills wrote:
>And the users! Someone _will_ try to make mailbox 'misc', and then try
>to make '...crap' under it. Never underestimate the users' ability to
>come up with strange edge-case scenarios :-)
This mailbox (misc/...crap) would be translated to misc....crap, true,
which would map back to misc..crap. Not one-to-one. So I agree that my
suggestion sucks ;).
>The above case would not be possible to encode in IMAPdir, even though
>the hierarchy delimiter has not been used. This would generally not be
>a problem ('...crap' is pretty weird, really), except that literal dots
>at the very beginning of the mailbox name (at the root of the tree)
>*are* allowed.
>How about a separate escape character? Instead of overloading the dot
>to mean three things (escape, literal, separator), have:
>\ (escape char)
>\\ (literal \)
>. (hierarchy delimiter)
>\. (literal dot)
>I am talking about the IMAPdir representation, of course, not about the
>imap side of things. The only thing that is a little tricky is that
>'\' is already an escape character in most (all?) unix shells, so
>anyone modifying their IMAPdirs by hand will need to use single quotes
>or double-escape their backslashes.
>This wouldn't change the leading dot special case, it would remain a
>literal dot, regardless of wether it is escaped or not.
I agree that having a \ as part of a file name isn't technically a
problem, but then again - we could just forbid both the hierarchy
delimiter and the '.' from mailbox names, as Charlie suggested.
_But_ with the exception that folders that already start with a single '.'
are interpreted with the dot being part of the folder name. The user would
then be free to rename og delete such folders, just not create them..
Andy :-/
--
Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg
Author of Binc IMAP | Nil desperandum
