[dovecot] Re: Changing hierarchy separator to '/'

[Charlie Brady]

On 16 Apr 2003, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 01:03, Charlie Brady wrote:
> > >From TODO:
> > 
> > ...
> >     - maildir: change it to use '/' as hierarchy separator to allow '.'
> >       characters (for usernames in shared folders)
> > ...
> > 
> > Now changing the separator in the maildir-storage.c is trivial (even 
> > though it "can't" be changed :-), but fixing the resultant breakage in 
> > maildir-list.c needs a little more understanding. Timo, could you give me 
> > some pointers? I can see that I need to work out what imap_match_init() 
> > does.
> 
> Did you want to change the '.' separator in filenames too?

Yes. AIUI, it's necessary to do so, otherwise there is confusion as to 
whether a . is literal or is a stand-in /.

To summarize:

- I'd like to use / as hierarchy separator, so that existing .mailboxlist 
files can be used (after moving them to ./Maildir/.subscriptions)
- I'd like to change the filename separator to ';' rather than '.', so 
that users can have folder names containing '.'.
- I don't care about Courier compatibility.

As an academic exercise, is there a reason other than Courier 
compatibility that subfolders can't be directories nested inside other 
directories? IOW, if we use / as the hierarchy separator, could we also 
use it in the filesystem paths of folders. (I realise that a reasonable 
amount of code would need to change to make this possible).

Regards

--
Charlie