On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Charlie Brady wrote:
>On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote:
>And we are talking about a single backend just now.
Rounding up this discussion, I think there are a few points that we
disagree on that we will forever disagree on:
1 - Binc IMAP has a dead line, and has to be done by ...
This is completely wrong. There are absolutely no time requirements in
this project. Nobody is pushing for releases, and it's a completely
quality driven project.
It is not a project where we have to get releases out fast, in order to
satisfy users. On the contrary, it's a project where we will focus on
doing it right, striving for perfection, but continuously releasing
milestones, perhaps never reaching Nirvana.
"Extreme programming" is about money - business - quantity - expectations.
That book has no value in this project.
2 - We should focus on one backend
This is completely the opposite of my philosophy for Binc. I'm striving to
make it a modular server. Pluggable. Choose your own backend, your mailbox
formats, your authentication methods and so on.
The default module is Maildir, and it will continue to be Maildir. I will
not add native PostgreSQL/ODBC support, nor will I add support for mbox.
But when the design is close to ready, creating these backends will be a
piece of cake. So those backends _will_ start showing up.
3 - Binc is in competition with Dovecot and Courier-IMAP
No! It is not. This is free software - GPL - and not in any way driven by
any market forces. If people choose Dovecot - fine! Courier-IMAP? Fine! I
don't care and neither should this community.
Seriously - if people choose Binc it will be for its modularity,
simplicity and design. Its general quality. And I hope seriously that the
other server authors out there at some point can look at Binc and go
"Right, that's the way I should have done it in my server".
4 - You say we should disallow both '.' and '/' in mailbox names
- I say '.' is not a delimiter, it's an artifact from NNTP
- You say NNTP is off topic
- I say '/' and '\' are natural delimiters, while '.' is not, and
there is no reason to not allow '.' in mailbox names.
- You say '/' and '\' are _not_ natural
- I say you're splitting hairs, because '/' and '\' are _the_ most
common hierarchy delimiters
Finally:
"That's true, but I don't see the usefulness of discussing them in this
context. IMO we should be concerning ourselves only with IMAP folder
references and storage in the file system."
I try hard to keep the thread going, but it's very hard to keep the
quality of a discussion if it's all about disagreeing.
Andy
--
Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg
Author of Binc IMAP | Nil desperandum
