[dovecot] Re: [bincimap] bincimap

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mon, 2003-02-17 at 11:33, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote:
> Binc IMAP's approaches are to use a secure programming language with
> secure well-known contructs, and with an as-simple-as-possible design,
> making it very easy for everyone to grasp how the server works. This will
> also help the community find and fix bugs.

I kind of agree, but not at the expense of security. I have tried to
keep my code clean and ugly-optimization-free anyway.

> Here's where I would say - there are hundreds of working POP3 servers
> around, both in closed and open source, so adding a POP3 server to the
> Dovecot project just introduces more lines of code where bugs may appear
> ;).

Yes, and I wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been so easy. I don't
really encourage people to use it anyway, it's even disabled by default.
If it has bugs, it doesn't affect the IMAP side.

If people really need to run both IMAP and POP3 servers, it is simpler
to use the same configuration for both, especially if the configuration
isn't "standard" (eg. LDAP or SQL authentication, mailboxes in special
locations, etc).

All other major IMAP servers provide their own POP3 servers as well, if
you haven't noticed :)

> Donald Knuth said in a seminar that I attended that the best way to keep a
> program free from bugs it to complete it. Finish off the project, work on
> fixing bugs. That's Binc IMAP's philosophy.

That's the ideal situation, and even possible if you keep the original
goals. But there are IMAP extensions which may require large changes,
new mail storage formats and ways to deliver mail into them, clustering,
etc.