tarballs (was: [ANNOUNCE] OfflineIMAP v6.3.1 released)

[Sebastian Spaeth]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2011 20:23:11 +0100, Thomas Kahle <tomka at gentoo.org> wrote:
> First off: I have 'inherited' the patch from other Gentoo maintainers
> before me.  Second, I don't have MacOS to do any experiments with this,
> but from reading the post I think I understand that on MacOS there is a
> 'CoreFramework' that needs to be loaded before the threads using it are
> started.  If I understand this correctly this is independent of the fact
> that offlineimap uses python and can be reproduced in C.

Oh, I am not blaming you for fixing bugs, or inheriting patches....  

I just want to understand what a patch does when I don't get it. I see
how we might be needing to initialize something on Mac if its broken,
but then we should have something in the code commenting on what it does
and why it is in there. Otherwise someone in a few years will say, "oh
we import everything from locale but we never use it, so lets remove
it".

Also, we should be able to import something more specific rather than
"*" polluting our default namespace. Importing * would give us functions
such as normalize(), format(), format_string() in our default namespace.
It would also override str() and other stuff that could well lead to
unexpected behavior.

> I agree that importing everything from locale is a hack, only used to
> make MacOS load the CoreFramework before threading.  Somebody who knows
> more about the internals of MacOS could provide a patch how to properly
> ensure that this thing is loaded before offlineimap starts to fork
> threads.

I would prefer that, but then that is just my personal opinion and
doesn't represent the views of the offlineimap project :-).

Sebastian