Re: Thoughts on the future direction of OfflineIMAP

[Akkana Peck <akkana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Goerzen writes:
> I'd like to ask a follow-up question while we're talking about meta issues:
> 
>   What would be the best thing to do to get you personally involved with
>   writing code for OfflineIMAP?

Well, as Jared just said, open source is "personal requirement" driven,
so it would most likely be some area that affects my own use.  Things
like syncing multiple IMAP servers, or GUI work, sound cool in theory
but I'll never use them so it would be hard to get motivated.

Generally, having specific things to fix, things which are interesting
to me and come in bite sized pieces, are really helpful in luring people
in to an OSS project.

Things that I've thought about trying to work on in offlineimap:

(1) The way messages keep getting stuck in new/ even after I've marked
them as no longer new, so mutt forever thinks that folder has new
messages in it until I fiddle with it by hand.  This seems to happen
when something's been New for several cycles before get gets marked as
read.  Maybe it's a mutt/maildir bug.  I waste a lot of time chasing it.

(2) A better way of syncing folders that get UID validity problems,
which happens all the time.  Removing the whole folder uses up a lot
of bandwidth and I keep hoping I can find a more efficient way.

(3) More UI updates: I sent in that patch to do SummaryUI, but
I'm going to keep tweaking on that here and there.

(4) Tons of IMAP errors -- I never get through a full run without some
IMAP errors, but I'm hoping your rewrite magically fixes that without
my having to do any work. :-)  Still, I might be able to pitch in
there you could suggest some way that other people could help.

And here's a bigger one, a feature: mbox format rather than maildir. 
I don't know how much I care, I don't know how hard it would be,
but mutt really doesn't do maildir all that well compared to mbox
(there's the problem with new messages not getting marked properly,
and there's the problem that it can't tell which folders you've visited
recently, so any folder with a new message is considered new forever
even if you just looked at it; also it generally seems quite a bit
slower), so now and then I wonder whether it might be easier to try
to write mbox support for offlineimap than to try to solve the
problems associated with maildir and mutt.

        ...Akkana