Weeeelll ... I think, sadly, that to really make things like IMAP a win
we need to abstract out things a bit more.
that sounds right. however, i'm not sure if you're saying that
abstracting out the POSIX stuff so that it can also handle Maildir is
not a good first correctness-preserving transformation that would set us
up well for a second such transformation once IMAP's semantics and
impedance are better understood, or, if you think there's no point in
doing it in two steps, and we should understand everything before we do
anything. can you elaborate?
I guess I'm saying I don't think abstracting out the POSIX filehandling
stuff to also support Maildir is worth it as a first step, because I think an
IMAP-friendly API is going to be such a huge change that we should focus
on that.
To me, there are two BIG API changes that should be done in nmh. The
first is message parsing; no program should ever have to call m_getfld()
again, there should be a common set of routines that you call to get out
headers, MIME part information, etc etc. You probably want to integrate
that with the format engine so the list of "interesting" headers can be
filled in at that time. This is what I've referred to as "full MIME
parsing".
The second is how to access mailboxes & messages; in theory you'd think
this is simple, and for Maildir we could probably get away with only a
few small changes. But once you throw in IMAP you really want to handle
it completely differently. A lot of message parsing gets done by the
IMAP server itself, so if you design the previous API properly hopefully
you can get a win there as well.
So I've got some relatively concrete ideas for the first one; the
second one I've got some vague notions.
--Ken
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