Re: [Evolution-hackers] serious imap bugs in 2.3.6.

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 22:35 -0700, Ray Lee wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 13:19 +0800, Not Zed wrote:
> > The best workaround at present would be not to upgrade to 2.3.6 if you
> > use IMAP. This only affects IMAP.
> 
> Sigh. Thanks for the heads up. Tangentially, could someone with a clue
> about the code post or attach a todo to CVS for cleaning up the IMAP
> implementation? Rumor has it that it needs some love, like all code from
> time to time, and perhaps some of us could start stepping up if given a
> bit of guidance.

Hmm, I guess a TODO is a possibility.

But it is quite a TODO - the fundamental problem is that the
implementation is synchronous.  It doesn't support multiple pipelined
requests at all, which means that splitting up requests to multiplex the
connection would slow it down too much.  The connection needs some
multiplexing so that long-running operations dont block others so much.
Some recent changes to locking and the way things done should remove a
lot of the blocking anyway; so it may not be such a problem in 2.4.

It's just messy old spaghetti code too - originally written by a lisp
programmer who didn't understand structured programming at all.  It is
very touchy code.

Which is why several attempts have been made at 'rewriting' it, Jeff's
attempt - imap4 - addressed the coding issues, but not so much the
architecture.  I've done two, imapp, which never got working, and imapx,
which is on another branch of camel which works very differently and so
can't be back practically.

 Michael