Syncing strategy

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 10:42:51PM +0100, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> 
> Why is /tmp not a good temporary directory? I am using pythons mktmpdir
> function to create it, run the tests and clean it up after the tests
> finish. What's wrong with using that?

Inspection. In case of a failure we could want to inspect the results in
the temporary path. The content of the tmp path for the test suites can
become a "working path". It is not as volatile as the temporary path
used for the running system. This means

  - have a minimal strategy to clean the tmp path;
  - keep the files upon OS reboot (restarting the system shouldn't have
    effect to the working state).

We don't know if /tmp is wiped at startup.

> > > So far so good.. The dificulties:
> > >  - Offlineimap does not support Maildir2Maildir syncing using the
> > >    high-level functionality. I understand this is due to the
> > >    impossibility of doing IMAP<->Maildir1<->Maildir2<->IMAP2 (because of
> > >    different UIDs being assigned to the messages by the servers). But
> > >    for testing purposes that hurts me. And I will propose patches to
> > >    make that easier. But that is not urgent.
> > 
> > I'm not sure I understand. Why would we want syncing Maildir to Maildir?
> > We can 'cp -a' the maildirs for the tests, no?
> 
> Right, we could. It would just defeat the purpose of testing syncing
> :-). I currently run syncing tests that are offline, ie no IMAP server
> involved. For that I do Maildir<->Maildir syncing.

This is were we are wrong I think. Setting up a true mailbox dedicated
to the tests should be a prerequisite stage. Otherwise, the test suites
may defeat his purpose in some cases. The code involved in the tests
could faster differ from the real case.


-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht