Re: The sad state of locking -> it almost works

[Alain Magloire]

> 
> FWIW, what I've been up to is more-or-less re-implementing something
> along the lines of the API of the original libmailbox.  There are a
> couple of reasons I've been doing this.  The foremost reason is purely
> as an academic exercise.  I have no experience working on anything
> but small projects, and I thought it would be good to do that.
> Another is (as I mentioned a while back) I want to mess with MMIO vs.
> read/write and compare performance and resource utilization.
> Mailutils has a lot of nice features but it's kinda clunky and
> overkill for what I want to do (IMO).  
> 
> That leads to the next reason which is I was hoping mailutils would be
> what I originally understood it was going to be...  a small, tight API
> for providing access at the physical layer to mail folders.  I don't
> remember who the original author of Gnu pop3d was (Alain maybe?), just
> that he was really bitter about not getting into UW, and wanted to
> show them up...  :)  
> 
> Anyway, you guys are doing some really cool things with mailutils, and
> I like the idea of url access especially.  But I'd rather see that
> implemented in a different layer, on top of the physical access layer.
> It seems to me mailbox kinda tries to handle everything all at once,
> and I'd rather break everything down into layers -- physical layer,
> application layer (like dealing with MIME and e-mail addresses and
> lions and tigers and)...  


Good points, we will do that: two layers, the first one dealing with the
mailbox format nothing fancy i.e. get the job efficiently,
the second layer: the framework to do all that fancy things.
As you are pointing out one should be able to use say pop3 without
having to go through the entire framework layer.

So if you are working on one of the formats:
POP3, Mailbox, Maildir, IMAP4, MH etc ..
it probably can be reuse once we move on to the second stage.

You are probably a little harsh on our first attempt, but it's not that
bad and we learn a lot from it and most of the code will probably
be backported with some care not too make the same mistakes 8-)