[Dovecot] Roadmap to future

[Timo Sirainen]

Hmm. Maybe a feature packed v1.2 would be a good idea after all. It  
wouldn't have any huge underlying changes, so most likely it could be  
released only a few months after v1.1.

> Implemented, but slightly buggy so not included in v1.1 (yet):
>
>  - Mailbox list indexes
>  - THREAD REFERENCES indexes
>  - THREAD X-REFERENCES2 algorithm where threads are sorted by their  
> latest
>    message instead of the thread root message

These would just need some bug fixing and testing, so it shouldn't  
take long to get them finished. Mailbox list indexes will also allow  
automatically sending STATUS replies when non-selected mailboxes  
change. Perhaps that shouldn't be done by default, but it allows an  
efficient implementation for Lemonade's NOTIFY draft.

Mailbox list indexes would work faster with improved v2.0 transaction  
log format though.. Now it's kind of bloated. I should probably  
benchmark it again after my recent index handling fixes. Maybe it's  
not that bad anymore.

> Could be implemented for v1.2:
>
>  - Shared mailboxes and ACLs
>    http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-April/021624.html
>  - Virtual mailboxes:
>    http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-May/022828.html
>     - Depends on mailbox list indexes

Again shouldn't be a huge job.

Then a bunch of IMAP extensions could be implemented:

  - Lemonade: CATENATE, URLAUTH, COMPRESS, WITHIN
  - ESEARCH and maybe some other simple to implement (draft) extensions
  - ANNOTATE and METADATA drafts? URLAUTH could be built on top of  
METADATA functionality. All of these could be built on top of lib-dict.

lib-dict could probably use a couple of more backends. At least a  
simple "filesystem" backend for testing, and it could also be good as  
URLAUTH backend.

> dbox plans, could be implemented for v1.2:
>
>  - Support for single instance attachment storage
>  - Global dbox storage so copying messages from mailbox to another  
> involves
>    only small metadata updates
>  - Support some kind of hashed directories for storing message  
> files, instead
>    of storing everything in a single directory.
>  - Finish support for storing multiple messages in a file

These could be implemented for v1.2, but they're pretty complex  
changes and I'm not too excited about implementing them.. Although  
some day I would want to move my own mails from mbox format to  
multiple-mails-per-file dbox format. :)

> v2.0 master/config rewrite

v2.0 would then have proxying, replication, LMTP server and index  
file optimizations.

CONDSTORE extension probably needs to wait for v2.0 as well, since it  
would require non-backwards compatible changes to transaction log  
files (new "conditional flag/keyword update" records).

If v1.2 happens, v2.0 would probably be released sometimes (end of?)  
next summer. If v1.2 doesn't happen, v2.0 would probably come around  
spring.
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