On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 12:19 -0400, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
Venaktesh is a friend of mine working on a patch to the venerable Alpine mail reader so it can read Maildir format mailboxes on disk.
Venkatesh wanted to know if he could use some code from Dovecot's lib-storage (safely opening/reading Maildirs, including accounting for NFS and ESTALE) and the UID->message mapping code.
This way, Dovecot and Alpine would agree on how to handle UIDs for a given Maildir-format mailbox. Plus Alpine could benefit from the thought you've put into the safety of Maildirs on IMAP (which is *not* trivial!).
Maybe I'm biased :) but I think MUAs nowadays should just use IMAP instead of accessing mails locally directly.
Also I don't especially like Dovecot's maildir code. I guess it works pretty good nowadays, but it could still be cleaned up somewhat.
But there are some possible licensing issues. .. License-wise, there are two choices, if you're willing Timo: the modified Dovecot code could be released under GPLv3, which *is* compatible with the Alpine license - it would just mean Alpine+Maildir would be GPLv3 when put together. Or you could grant a special permission to Venkatesh to distribute the modified Dovecot code under the Apache License 2.0.
Anyway, sure, I don't really care about maildir code. And it looks like about all of it has been written by me, so there shouldn't be a problem for me to give it away with another license. So maybe something like:
I hereby allow Dovecot v1.2.4 release's code under src/lib-storage/index/maildir/ directory to be redistributed under any of the following open source licenses:
- LGPL v2.1
- MIT
- Apache License 2.0