Re: Where to from here?

[Martijn Pieters <mj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 01:21:58PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> > For this to work, offlineimap wil have to log very different messages than
> > the current output provides. minimal success messages (number of
> > folders/messages processed), and clean exception messages. it also needs to
> > be more robust in the face of server exceptions, such as connection refused
> > problems.
> 
> Fortunately, the modular system already allows us to do this, as all I/O is
> filtered through the UI modules, including exceptions from all threads!  So
> all we need is a new UI module.

I saw this, when giving it a brief glance. Cool!

> Not sure what a more robust answer to "connection refused" is, though :-)

Not exit? Skip sync, go into autorefresh mode, and either keep spewing
"connection refused" errors to the log or only once in a while say "Still no
connection."

This way a mail server restart won't kill my daemon process.

> > Once you start running offlineimap as a true dameon process, system
> > administrators will want to use one process to serve all their users,
> > resulting in potential ecurity problems; you'll have to think about what
> > user account you'd run offlineimap as, and how mailboxes are written. It
> > also may be necessary to limit the number of simultaionous connections per
> > server connected to (not just the number of parallel accounts and number of
> > connections per account).
> 
> This, I think, is unwise.  I don't think we should go down that road.  It
> opens up so many cans of worms, and really has no advantages that I can
> think of.  Think about a system-wide fetchmail and the problems that would
> entail, but multiplied because in this case we not only have to worry about
> each user's configuration but also about directly delivering the mail.

Fetchmail only has to worry about reading configuration files, delivery
happens through a socket to a local SMTP server so it doesn't have the
write-file headache.

> It's like trying to make Word a daemonized process that runs as root :-)
> Doesn't make sense to me.

Sure, just raising a flag. :) If you provide daemon-like capabilities, it
should be clearly flagged in the docs that running this as root for all your
users is a Bad Idea (tm).

-- 
Martijn Pieters
| Software Engineer  mailto:mj@xxxxxxxx
| Zope Corporation   http://www.zope.com/
| Creators of Zope   http://www.zope.org/
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