At 8:07 PM -0500 1/30/03, John C Klensin wrote:
This really isn't worth much discussion unless someone is really
going to launch such an effort, but I don't see the distinction as
clearly as you do.
One concern I had was that there would appear to be agreement that
lemonade would "simplify IMAP", but in reality people expected
different things, and would then object when the WG produced
something different. "Simplifying" can mean different things.
We already have a situation in which some clients won't
interoperate well with some servers because the clients think they
need certain capabilities that those servers don't support. And we
have other server authors that have refused to implement certain
features because they (the authors) are convinced those features
are brain-damaged.
True.
I'd like to see a WG give careful consideration to the question of
the damage that would be done by pulling commands and replacing
them with better/ cleaner designs as well as the type of revision I
think you anticipate with the first case.
IMAP does a lot of things. It provides access to messages,
information about those messages, various mailbox management things,
access to information about mailboxes, creation of messages, and so
on. There's been suggestions over the years that this is really too
much for one protocol, that, for example, mailbox management should
be a different protocol. There was some interest a while back in
using ACAP to provide information about mailboxes and messages,
leaving IMAP to just offer access to the messages.
On the other hand, one of the complaints by people implementing
Internet mail clients on handsets and palm devices is that there are
too many protocols, each with its own syntax. SMTP, IMAP, MIME and
so on all require different parsers. Adding still more protocols
would make this aspect worse.
But, in the last analysis, IMAP4bis is still at Proposed. Like
you, I'd prefer something easier to implement and deploy that is
fully compatible with IMAP4bis. But, if that isn't possible, then
I think it would be rational to consider other alternatives, with
the understanding that some implementations would try to be
conforming to both the older and newer versions and that it would
be wise to design things so as to make that possible.
I think people have tended to be scared of this approach.
--
Randall Gellens
Opinions are personal; facts are suspect; I speak for myself only
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