On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Dan Mills wrote: > On Monday, March 17, 2003, at 07:29 PM, Charlie Brady wrote: > > > But why is there any need to do it at all? > > I'm not sure what you are referring to. The need to differentiate > "foo" from ".foo" seems obvious enough :-)
But it's not obvious at all. Just because a file or directory exists or can exist does not mean we need to be able to refer to it via IMAP, using bincimap. As I explained yesterday, if "." is the hierarchy separator, then "foo" and ".foo" are the same IMAP folder. Whether I ask for "foo" or I ask for ".foo", then I get the same folder. The maildir directory which stores the messages of this folder will have one name, as decided by Andreas - I guess it will be ".foo". If "foo" exists as well, then bincimap can just ignore it. > Maybe you mean the need to allow dots to be used at all. I think the > reason is this- > > * Dots have to be allowed in the filesystem (Maildir++ legacy). Let's work out what Maildir++ is: - a mapping of IMAP names to maildir directory names - drop the first, optional, folder separator - convert each folder separator to a period - prefix the string with "~/Maildir/." - a quota mechanism There are two uses of period above - one is the prefix (which serves no obvious purpose), and the other is to represent the hierarchy separator. As Courier uses period as the hierarchy separator, we only need to prefix the IMAP folder name with "~/Maildir/." to come up with the Maildir++ directory name, relative to the home directory of the user. Note that in the scheme above "~/Maildir/foo" doesn't have an IMAp representation. Neither does "~/foo". These are just facts of life, and not problems which need to be solved. Get over it. > * Dots are not required in the filesystem (User requested, hence > IMAPdir). I don't understand what you mean here. > * There is a need to disambiguate the same mailbox name with and > without a leading dot, then. I just don't accept that. > I think it would be valid to specify in the IMAPdir spec that the agent > creating the mailbox needs to check for the same mailbox with/without > the leading dot, and refuse to create it if it's already there. This is just creating work. Why do we need it? > >> But that just creates more problems when the > >> user decides to manually move in an mbox file called "foo" into the > >> IMAPdir. No. That's no different to the user creating a maildir called foo, or a maildir called /tmp/foo. That maildir just won't be visible via IMAP. > My comments were about the IMAPdir structure and its intended > interpretation, not about policy imposed by binc imap. But they are the same thing. "IMAPdir" (currently) has no existence outside bincimap. And I don't see that it is likely to any time soon. > So no, binc imap doesn't have to support manually moved files. But > IMAPdir does. Why? -- Charlie
