[PATCH 11/15] Do not encode elements of list

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 08:19:36PM +0200, Łukasz Żarnowiecki wrote:

> I tried Python3 version of imaplib2, but it does not work even with
> Python3.  I can try reach developers and work with them 

Piers (cc'ed) is the creator and maintainer of imaplib2. AFAICT, he
wrote the first imaplib version included in Python.

I think he would welcome inputs/patches about imaplib2 for Python 3
since this is still a recent migration. Actually, he sent me his first
version of imaplib2 for python3 in private before it was made public so
I can test it and report him issues.

>                                                         while this patch
> makes offlineimap work both with Python2 and Python3 without any visible
> regression on my setup and the change is so easy that maintenance would
> not be pain in the ass.

We don't diverge from upstream. This was discussed in the past and we
decided to apply this policy to avoid more maintenance work that would
come if we have to follow upstream and maintain our own series of
patches.

> By the way why we bundle offlineimap with imaplib2 in the first place?

Since the early days, Offlineimap was built as a big wrapper on top of
imaplib2. It is historically shipped with imaplib2. I decided to not
remove the bundled version of imaplib2 because:

- I'd rather offlineimap to work by just downloading the sources,
  without worrying about the deps;
- We would have to handle bug reports for random versions of imaplib2;
- imaplib2 is not packaged in all distributions;
- offlineimap only talks imaplib2.

Perhaps I should add this in the FAQ because it's a recurrent topic. :-)

> Does offlineimap makes some modification to their code?

Yes while never in the offlineimap repository. I've always requested
contributors with patches on imaplib2 to work with upstream and send
their patches to Piers. AFAIK, John (the creator of offlineimap) was
doing the same.

So, Piers is well aware of offlineimap and we send him patches and make
bug reports as much as we can. While he knows few on the offlineimap
codebase, he even helped us to solve offlineimap bugs in the past.
Also, he makes its best to be responsive and he is maintaining imaplib2
much better than anyone else can do in the offlineimap community.

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht