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.
Agreed!
Agreed. I guess I was making the assumption that you wanted to allow you to run Courier (or any other Maildir++ using client) in parallel with bincimap.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.
And some of us use Mutt directly against the file system, so it would be nice if it were consistent.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. :-)
OK. It seems we have the semantics defined for files and directories. So, that leaves named pipes and devices... does that limit the number of different kinds of mail stores can be defined in an IMAPdir?-) [No, you don't have to answer this one!-]Definitely! I recommend going EVEN FURTHER and say that everything in anThe question is, should special files be prepended with a dot with IMAPdir? .bincimap-cache .bincimap-subscribed
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
Henry
-- Henry Baragar Principal, Technical Architecture 416-453-5626 Instantiated Software Inc. http://www.instantiated.ca
