IDLE again

[John Goerzen]

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:
> If we can momentarily pretend that the Python 3 question is answered, 
> then I'll just toss in that I'd be quite interested to see offlineimap 
> use Twisted for it's protocol needs.

In that case, I'll offer this:

If someone wants to port OfflineIMAP to Twisted, and produces a stable
and maintainable result, I will happily call it OfflineIMAP 7 and turn
the OfflineIMAP maintainer hat over to you.  You will get admin access
to the software.complete.org project and mailing list and I will retire
from maintaining the project :-)

I don't see this as a bad thing, as I've been trying to retire from this
project for years now.  And, in fact, have tried to hand over the
maintainer hat once or twice, only to find the new maintainer lose
interest after a couple of weeks.  So if someone's proposal to port it
to twisted is accompanied by a credible intention to maintain the
project for years to come, then that's fine with me.

> issues or adding the necessary features to imaplib (although I do *feel* 
> like imaplib is so low-level that, overall, using Twisted's APIs would 
> have to be an improvement).

That's why I initially embarked on that project myself.  You'd think
that, but really the callbacks proved to be so spaghetti-inducing, and
debugging so difficult, that although it ran, it wasn't really maintainable.

I think that both imaplib and Twisted are fundamentally wrong
approaches, each in their own unique way.

If I ever get the spare time (haven't in the 2 or 3 years I've been
considering this, so don't hold your breath), I'd love to rewrite
OfflineIMAP in Haskell, and solve this problem and some others (not
crashing when a connection goes down, etc) in one fell swoop.  But
again, I don't see that happening anytime soon, so meanwhile we get to
live with the "joy" that is imaplib.

-- John