[PATCH 01/15] Raise exceptions as defined in PEP 3109

[Ilias Tsitsimpis]

Hi,

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 02:18PM, Łukasz Żarnowiecki wrote:
> > The bad news is about the license. I'm not sure we can bundle and use
> > this lib without adding a new clause in the current GPL licence. This
> > would be sad because this would mean contacting all the contributors
> > requesting them to agree with the new clause. This was previously done
> > by Sebastian for adding the OpenSSL clause and this is a real work.
> > 
> > There are currently 109 contributors in `git shortlog -ns`.
> > 
> > I'm cc'ing both Ilias and Sebatian because the issue raised about the
> > OpenSSL was done by Debian. They might have hints for us and the AS-IS
> > licence might be compatible with the GPL. I don't know.
> 
> I think we can include MIT licensed software inside GPL one.
> Wikipedia[1] says that it is compatible.  I don not know about the
> clause.

IANAL but I too believe that we can use an MIT licensed software inside
a GPL one. On the other hand, Debian doesn't accept a GPL program
linking with OpenSSL, unless upstream gave a license exception for this.
See also:

    https://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html
    https://www.openssl.org/docs/faq.html#LEGAL2
    https://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html

> > I'm not sure we can safely abandon Python 2. I'm not concerned by Python
> > 2 compatibility myself but I wonder some users will complain. I would
> > not decide to abandon Python 2 without polling our users first. IOW,
> > this means communicating about that on twitter, this mailing list, the
> > blog, create an issue and see if we have complaints in a reasonable
> > amount of time.
> 
> There will be always a person that want Python2 support and if it is not
> a big deal to support both version we should not abandon those people.

Since OfflineIMAP is a Python application and not a Python library, I
don't see a reason why users will complain (unless of course their
distribution doesn't support Python 3). On the other hand, I am not sure
what will happen with the pythonfile feature (where users give their own
code to be evaluated by OfflineIMAP). 

> > Also, I wonder some users might be tempted to support a fork for Python
> > 2. This would mean maintaining yet another software and I'm definetly
> > not going to do this job myself. We could invite a maintainer to the
> > team for this purpose, though.
> 
> > To be clear, I'm not opposed to a migration to Python 3 only. I'd even
> > say that time has come. Still, we can't decide to do this without
> > carefully requesting the users and see if the complaints are marginal
> > enough.
> 
> For now, I would rather support Python2 and Python3.  There are still
> distributions that ships only Python2.

I agree, a smother transition (where both Python2 and Python3 are
supported) would be the best option.

-- 
Ilias