Re: Thoughts on the future direction of OfflineIMAP

[Andrew Cowie <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2003-07-26 at 00:37, Jean Jordaan wrote:
> > On the other hand it would be a pain in Linux.
> 
> I agree .. perhaps it's just a matter of familiarity, but juggling
> VMs and installing huge JDKs just because I want to run some small
> Java program has been irksome in the past. 

True, but things have grown up quite a bit. Most distributions nowadays
have got a good grip on the providing-java problem. In the past year or
so I've seen great progress - to the point where Java is Just There and
Just Working (tm) on all the machines I'm running - without any
extraordinary effort on my part.

And of course, once Java is installed for one program, its pretty much
good to go for all. [Yes, I realize there are exceptions. I'm
generalizing here. :)]

John, if you DO switch to Java, then it would be in your best interest
to restrict yourself to features available in 1.2 or at latest 1.3 -
then you know it'll run everywhere. Depend on 1.4.1 -only features, and
then people have  a hard time keeping up. That more than anything led to
the Java version hell that so many of us have been through.

Threading in Java is hard to beat. It's that Just Works thing again. I'm
ok with it if you want to switch to Java.

Oh, one other word of caution - JavaMail has been known to do some
quirky stupid things in the past. I think they've got most of the cruft
out, but this *is* Sun we're talking about.

> > Personally I really don't see the point of having a GUI for a 
> > tool such as offlineIMAP. 
> 
> Agree again. I've only ever started the GUI accidentally.

Ha. That's funny. I'm going to steal that. :)

AfC

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd

Australia +61 2 9977 6866  North America +1 646 270 5376

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/