Another stab at IMAP IDLE

[Ethan Glasser-Camp]

On 01/18/2011 04:13 PM, Leon Bogaert wrote:
> I'm very interested in this too. I would be glad to help a hand. By
> testing or
> by coding pieces of it.
>
> Regards,
> Leon

Hey,

Regarding current status: I haven't written any code since the last 
patch series I sent to the mailing list. I did spend a lot of time 
tracking down a mysterious hang that eventually seems to be related to a 
multithreading deadlock. It's sporadic so I couldn't nail down what 
exactly caused it, but it certainly might have something to do with 
imaplib2.

I think the next step is to rewrite the patch series in a more 
approachable form. Nicholas suggested that we not go to too much effort 
to preserve the form of the commits as they were originally written, 
especially the commit messages, so I was figuring to have commits for:

- introducing the newest imaplib2 as a file, but not using it.
- switching over to it, including any semantic changes that are necessary.
- introducing IDLE functionality based on the timer hack originally 
implemented by James Bunton in 
http://delx.net.au/blog/2009/02/offlineimap-idle-support/ .

Plus whatever else seems necessary. I'm kind of busy for the next week 
or two, so if you wanted to beat the commit series into shape, that 
would be great.

Since imaplib2 was dropped due to reliability concerns, it seems pretty 
important that we not cause any horrible crashes or hangs in switching 
over to imaplib2. I'd love to have more testers running the version of 
offlineimap that supports IDLE, whether they enable it or not. I'm 
definitely seeing a sporadic hang on my extremely crappy Internet 
connection, more commonly when the connection is overloaded, and if 
anyone could reproduce that and track it down, that would be great.

I think if we get the above patches merged, then we'd be in good shape. 
So the two above things are my major concerns for when I get some free time.

Ethan