Hello dkg, On Tue 17 Sep 2019 at 09:31AM -04, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> getmail upstream appears to have no plans to convert to python3 in the > near future. > > Some of us use only a minimal subset of features of getmail, and it > would be nice to have something simpler, with the main complexity > offloaded to the modern python3 stdlib. This is a cool idea. I read through the script and I'm a bit apprehensive about the complexity involved in talking to the IMAP server, because it renders imap-dl significantly more complicated than anything else in mailscripts: > + # these objects are weirdly structured. i don't know why > + # these trailing close-parens show up. so this is very > + # ad-hoc and nonsense In general, it seems to me that mailscripts should fairly strongly favour simplicity over features, so that the scripts in mailscripts can be useful fixed points around which to build more complex (and perhaps more fragile) systems. Of course, imap-dl *is* simple in terms of its features, so I hope we can mitigate the risks of this IMAP complexity somehow. Would you consider writing an integration test suite for imap-dl? I would like it to be possible for us to be completely confident that imap-dl won't ever lose any user messages. > +=head1 DESCRIPTION > + > +If you use getmail to reach an IMAP server as though it was POP > +(retrieving from the server, storing it in a maildir and optionally > +deleting), you can point this script to the getmail config and it > +should do the same thing. > + > +It tries to ensure that the configuration file is of the expected > +type, and will terminate raising an exception, and it should not lose > +messages. > + > +If there's any interest in supporting other use cases for getmail, > +patches are welcome. I'm not keen on introducing imap-dl as a getmail replacement. Hopefully, in the future, the majority of imap-dl's users won't be people who ever used getmail. It would be good for the docs to introduce imap-dl without reference to getmail, and then explain later how it can be a getmail replacement. -- Sean Whitton
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