On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Dan Karp wrote:
But we can't publish a SORT draft in which FROM sorting is as broken as
it is in this draft. We really can't. It's worse than useless in its
present form, and leaving it as-is is significantly worse than just
omitting the FROM sort altogether.
I object to this statement and similar earlier statements. They are
needlessly provocative (among other things, Pine and Alpine have used and
documented these "worse than useless" facilities for nearly 20 years), and
presume that one person's opinions are proven fact in the face of contrary
opinion.
Furthermore, they disregard multiple interoperable client and server
implementations that have used the current definitions for over a
decade.
Apologies for not commenting sooner. For my server, implementing
sorting is sufficiently difficult that I'd decided to permanently skip
the SORT draft. But I was just informed that SORT has been made a
prerequisite for Lemonade, and so I did my first thorough read-through
of the draft last weekend.
Nothing requires that any client implements SORT. If you want to define
and implement an extended SORT, by all means start an effort to get that
going.
The implementation convenience in one server does not justify breaking a
long-term framework that existing implementations depend upon. It
especially not removing capabilities that are used by existing
widely-distributed client implementations.
There might be some merit if there was some notable technical difficulty
in implementing the specification on a server. But there is not. The
ability to generate the IMAP ENVELOPE is required in the base
specification and consequently all the data needed to implement FROM/TO/CC
sorting are present. This isn't a matter of "can not do", it is a matter
of "not wanting to do."
Any one of us can easily come up with a long list of facilities in
Internet specifications that we, as individuals, consider "useless" and
thus should be removed. However, one person's "useless" feature may be
another's vitally-important feature. The time to axe "useless" features
is when they are first proposed, not when there is over a decade of use
and deployment (in IMAP; nearly two decades in Pine).
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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