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.
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