On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote: > Christof Drescher writes: > > Anyway: Do you argue such an extension would not be wise to have? > There have been a great many attempts at this, all failed. I do not feel > competent to judge why they failed, and how it can successfully be done.
I can tell you why one attempt failed. There is a regrettable tendency within the IMAP community to pile up feature upon feature onto any proposal until that proposal collapses under its own weight. I had a design for a lightweight push-style event-driven status update. It was something that could have been easily and cheaply, and deployment could be easy and rapid. The response, in no uncertain terms, was that it was unacceptable because it didn't do this, that, and the other thing as well. Since the mechanism that I was going to deploy couldn't do this/that/the-other-thing (it could announce new mail, perhaps also expunge and flag changes), the whole thing collapsed. The lesson in this is that "perfect" is the enemy of "good enough" and "anything done at all". The ability to be told about new mail in a non-selected mailbox was sacrificed on the altar of "it has to be a complete STATUS, plus some other metadata that I'd like." -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
