Bug#405762: [Alpine-alpha] Maildir support
On Fri, 5 Jan 2007, Mark Crispin wrote: On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Asheesh Laroia wrote: Sadly, the maildir church claims that I don't do maildir out of some evil intent. Here are the facts: I do not know how to make a maildir driver that works well, which I define as: . complete compliance with IMAP's specifications . complete compliance with DSB's specifications . satisfactory performance I know how to do two of these, but not all three simultaneously. I'd be curious to know what Dovecot does, since it seems to straddle this line in some way. I haven't looked into it, but maybe someone on the list has some experience with its codebase in this regard. Having said that, if we're talking about Alpine reading a local mail spool, I don't see why compliance with IMAP's specifications is necessary. From what I have seen of the third-party maildir drivers, they cut corners on all three. Some also have a negative impact on non-maildir usage. I've fielded numerous Pine/c-client bug reports which turned out to be caused by these maildir drivers. When it turns out that the user does not use maildir, I recommend that s/he replace whatever distribution with an unmodified UW distribution (which of course has the effect of deleting any other third-party customizations). Well, that's one reason the Debian bug tracker is nice: if we ship some evilly hacked version of Alpine that includes some gross unsupported Maildir patch, a Debian user will hopefully file a bug with us rather than with you, and hopefully after warnings like this I'll be careful to check if our modifications are the cause of the breakage. Therefore, please flame me to a crisp if I end up forwarding any bugs to you that are caused by said evil Maildir patches. (-: -- Asheesh. -- Q: What is purple and concord the world? A: Alexander the Grape. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bug#405762: [Alpine-alpha] Maildir support
On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Asheesh Laroia wrote: I'd be curious to know what Dovecot does, since it seems to straddle this line in some way. I don't know. Having said that, if we're talking about Alpine reading a local mail spool, I don't see why compliance with IMAP's specifications is necessary. Internally, Alpine, Pine, ipop3d, imapd, etc. are all interfaces to the c-client library. There is no only by Alpine and not by imapd. c-client semantics are fundamentally IMAP semantics. c-client coerces all other mail stores to look like IMAP to the application program. Well, that's one reason the Debian bug tracker is nice: if we ship some evilly hacked version of Alpine that includes some gross unsupported Maildir patch, a Debian user will hopefully file a bug with us rather than with you, and hopefully after warnings like this I'll be careful to check if our modifications are the cause of the breakage. Thanks for helping us out with that. Quite a few users of third-party distributions contact us directly anyway. If the user's issue is something in the c-client library and I don't recognize the problem, the first thing that I suggest is are you using a third-party distribution? If so, try the unmodified UW distribution. Much (more than 50%) of the time, that resolves the user's issue. But they're not happy when I tell them that I can't do anything to fix the issue in that third-party distribution -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bug#405762: [Alpine-alpha] Maildir support
On 1/6/07, Asheesh Laroia [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: has anyone in the community considered writing such a patch for Alpine? I've ported Eduardo Chappa's maildir patch to alpine and have e-mailed him about it, but I haven't heard anything back. Since I don't know anything about what he has done and am a bit uncertain about its licensing, I'm reluctant to redistribute it. /Anders -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bug#405762: [Alpine-alpha] Maildir support
On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Asheesh Laroia wrote: Joey Hess filed a bug in the Debian package (*) about Alpine lacking support for the Maildir mail storage format. Apparently the pine source package that Debian ships comes with a patch for Maildir support. Apparently, it comes with an unsupported third-party maildir driver for the c-client library. Do you guys (washington.edu) plan to add Maildir support to Alpine? I (the c-client library developer) do not have any such plans. Sadly, the maildir church claims that I don't do maildir out of some evil intent. Here are the facts: I do not know how to make a maildir driver that works well, which I define as: . complete compliance with IMAP's specifications . complete compliance with DSB's specifications . satisfactory performance I know how to do two of these, but not all three simultaneously. I refuse to have my name associated with IMAP non-compliance. DSB would flame me to a crisp if I don't comply with his maildir specifications. That leaves lousy performance, and I would be flamed for deliberately making it because [I] dislike maildir. It's a no-win situation for me. From what I have seen of the third-party maildir drivers, they cut corners on all three. Some also have a negative impact on non-maildir usage. I've fielded numerous Pine/c-client bug reports which turned out to be caused by these maildir drivers. When it turns out that the user does not use maildir, I recommend that s/he replace whatever distribution with an unmodified UW distribution (which of course has the effect of deleting any other third-party customizations). Similar corner-cutting is done by the IMAP servers that support maildir. For example, Courier actually implements something that it calls maildir++ and a heresy of IMAP that it calls SMAP instead of true maildir and IMAP. The difficulty is that IMAP and maildir have some seriously conflicting requirements. Neither one considered the other when it was designed, and it shows. If not, has anyone in the community considered writing such a patch for Alpine? I'm sure that the third-parties which provide maildir drivers for older versions of the c-client library have (or will soon have) updated versions that fit in the imap-2006 version that is used by Alpine. Please be assured that if I had a brainstorm and suddenly realized how to write a maildir driver that works well (as defined above), I would do so. I haven't had such a brainstorm, and apparently nobody else has either. -- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
