On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Henry Baragar wrote: ><WARNING - reopening a old discussion>
:-) I thought we might take it public, since this is a pretty important subject. >Except that this is defined as a special case in definition of IMAPdir >(http://www.bincimap.org/bincimap-imapdir.html). I understand this was >done to facillitate migration from Courier, but I believe that the value >of this will diminish over time. As it is, if one wants use the IMAPdir Half a year ago I wanted Binc to only support Maildir++. Then I was convinced that compatibility with Maildir++ was enough, if we could provide a new depository that gave us all the benefits and none of the drawbacks. After experience with people who have done the transition from Maildir++ to IMAPdir, I see that users are annoyed when all their mailboxes suddenly start with a dot '.'. Users would in general be more happy if they could have their administrator run a conversion script that renamed their mailboxes, removing the dot. >scheme in a Maildir++ directory, one has to create a symbolic link for >INBOX to point to the current directory. If we ask the users to do this, >why not ask them to go step further and create symbolic links for all the >Maildir++ directories (same name but no leading dot). This acheives both >objectives of providing a simple migration path from Courier and providing >a clean (exception free) spec for IMAPdir's. ></WARNING> That would work, but I _think_ users would rather have the mailboxes renamed than have their Maildir full of symlinks :-D. >> mailboxes called "...ooops", but it's rare). >As an IMAPdir, would this not show up as ".\.\.oops"? Isn't this a little >counter-intuitive? (see above discussion) In the file system, yes :-). I don't know why anyone would want a root level mailbox that starts with a dot, so I just tried to come up with an example. :-) >> The question is, should special files be prepended with a dot with >> IMAPdir? >> .bincimap-cache >> .bincimap-subscribed >Definitely! I recommend going EVEN FURTHER and say that everything in an >IMAPdir that does not have a leading dot MUST be a maildir and that s/maildir/mailbox/ Remember that IMAPdir is not a Maildir-only depository - it's meant to work for any type of mailbox that can be identified by a single directory entry. :-) >anything that has a leading dot can be ignored by IMAPdir clients (which >may or may not be an IMAP server); that is, an IMAPdir client does not >have to go poking around the dot-prefixed files looking for mail (unless >said client wishes to hide the maildir from other clients). I'll pull back for a while now and see what others have to say on this subject. :-) Andy -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
