[dovecot] Re: bincimap

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:54:47PM +0100, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote:
> I can change the words in the FAQ if you feel offended by it, but you'll
> have to address points individually. I never made remarks about your
> personal code conventions, and I never claimed that my server "focuses on
> security" in the extent that Dovecot does.
> 
> If you want to discuss our different designs, please do it seriously,
> point for point, and don't just troll around like this.

Sorry, I just got a bit disappointed after reading the the web page first.
Your lines of code comparisions just seemed to imply that your server does
everything that others would but with only a fraction of code. There was
also something about Dovecot's design being too complex, so I thought you
might have solved those problems more elegantly.

When you write something from scratch, I think it's a good idea to design it
so that it's superior to existing implementations in at least some ways, not
just make a clone with slightly different coding style. If all you wanted
was a clone with some changes (and better maintainer), forking the project
would be much smaller job.

Well, here's some design thoughts:

Maildir implementation could be hidden behind a class to access it. That
would keep the ugly details hidden from the rest of the code, as well as
allow easily implementing other mail storages.

Restricting yourself to only plaintext authentication doesn't sound very
good plan.

Separating the pre-login process from post-login process would probably be a
good idea to keep their functionality completely separated. It would also be
easier to audit the pre-login code if you knew exactly what there is.
After logging in, you could just exec() the post-login process.

Don't use sprintf().

> Actually I don't get why you guys CC'd me personally on this. If you have
> anything in particular you want to discuss you can post it to the mailing
> list.

I just thought you'd rather want to see it now than months later in google.
I know I would. I didn't think it was really relevant to your mailing list,
but if you say so..