Re: Status update

[Aron Griffis <agriffis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

John Goerzen wrote:     [Fri Jun 04 2004, 11:11:07PM EDT]
> Sure.  Bear in mind as you notice the length of this message that you
> asked for it :-)

Wow!  Thanks for taking the time to write such a complete explanation.
Personally I agree that staying with threads instead of switching to
Twisted is the better route at this point.  My reason would simply be
the apparent lack of bugs in your current implementation.  Switching
would undoubtedly introduce new bugs that would then need to be
resolved.  And you might find as many bugs in Twisted as you find in
Python's thread support. ;-)

> BTW I notice you are a Gentoo developer.  (Great!  I'm a Debian
> developer... you may be interested in my Debian From Scratch rescue
> environment at http://people.debian.org/~jgoerzen/dfs/.  It's a rescue
> disk and installer modeled after Gentoo's.)

Thanks, I'll take a look.  Though I have to admit the only place I run
Debian at the moment is ia64.

> If there's anything I can
> do to help you out, please let me know.  I expect your port should be
> trivial since OfflineIMAP has no dependencies save Python (though it can
> use Python-Tk if installed).  But if there are ever patches, please try
> to make them generic and send my way.

Certainly.  So far there hasn't been a peep about offlineimap,
certainly a testimony to the quality of your code, since I'm sure that
people are using it on Gentoo.

> I tried out Gentoo briefly about a month ago and noticed that
> OfflineIMAP was masked on certain architectures.  This is probably an
> incorrect action.  

Well, Gentoo just has a different philosophy on architecture support.
Whereas Debian assumes a package will run on all architectures, then
will mask for architectures on which a package doesn't build or run,
Gentoo goes the other direction.  We have a policy of only marking a
package for the architectures on which it has been tested.

In the case of offlineimap, I personally have x86, alpha, ia64 and
amd64 machines, so those are the architectures for while offlineimap
has been made available.  If a sparc user wants to use offlineimap, he
can give it a whirl and report it as "working" at bugs.gentoo.org.  At
that point a sparc developer will add the sparc keyword to the
package.

> OfflineIMAP is written in pure Python.  If there is a
> problem on one arch or another, the problem would almost certainly be in
> Python instead of OfflineIMAP (so Python should possibly be masked on
> those archs).  

While this is true, the fact that Python bugs sometimes manifest
themselves in one script rather than another means that we're hesitant
to assume that anything will just *work* on all the platforms.
Generally we stick with the policy whether dealing with compiled or
interpreted programs.  Thanks for the suggestion, though.  :-)

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer