[gmime-devel] GMime 2.5.10: A Call For Testers

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj gnome org>]

(First off, apologies if this gets sent through as HTML mail, I 
copy/pasted from my blog)

I've just released GMime 2.5.10 which I hope to be the last of the 2.5 
releases before I release 2.6.0. I feel that I've stretched the 
development of 2.6.0 out for far too long (2.5 development began at the 
end of April, 2009) and even though I didn't get around to doing 
everything I had hoped to do, I feel that the latest 2.5.x releases are 
such an improvement over 2.4.x that I just want to get it out there for 
developers to start using. But before I make a 2.6.0 release, I'm hoping 
to get some feedback and some testing.


     What's new?

New for the release of 2.5.10 is *GMimePartIter* which replaces the need 
for /g_mime_object_foreach()/and its awkward callback requirement, 
instead allowing you to take the far nicer iterator approach that is 
popular in the C# and Java worlds (known as /IEnumerator/ in C#). This 
new iterator, like the foreach function it replaces, iterates over the 
MIME tree structure in depth-first 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth-first> order.

Inspired by IMAP's FETCH body part-specifier syntax, I've implemented a 
method allowing you to jump to a part based on a part-specifier string 
(aka a path): /g_mime_part_iter_jump_to()/. Also implemented is a 
function called /g_mime_part_iter_get_path()/, which can be used to tell 
you the current part-specifier path of the iterator.

For example, if you had the following MIME message structure:

multipart/related
  multipart/alternative
    text/plain
    text/html
  image/jpeg

The body part-specifier paths would be:

1    multipart/alternative
1.1  text/plain
1.2  text/html
2    image/jpeg

This means that /g_mime_part_iter_jump_to(iter, "1.2")/ would jump to 
the part specified by the path "1.2" which, as we can see above, would 
be the text/html part. Calling /g_mime_part_iter_next(iter)/ would 
iterate to the next part, being the image/jpeg, while calling 
/g_mime_part_iter_prev(iter)/ would iterate backwards to the text/plain 
part and calling it again would iterate backwards to the 
multipart/alternative.


     What I Need From Testers

My feeling is that developers will want to use this cool new body 
part-specifier path functionality for aiding them in implementing IMAP 
servers and/or clients. Because of this, it would be great if GMime's 
implementation matched IMAP's specification exactly. The problem is that 
I don't have the time or energy to verify that the paths work out to be 
identical in all cases. So... if you are one of those developers who is 
interested in using this functionality and need it to be identical to 
IMAP's syntax (or would really like it to be), I'm hoping that you could 
test it out and make sure that it matches. Especially worthwhile of 
testing, I'd imagine, is having message/rfc822 parts in the tree. I 
suspect that, if anywhere, this is where differences may be.

If body part-specifier paths aren't something you care about, don't 
fret; the rest of the iterator API needs testing as well and if you have 
no interest in the iterator API at all, perhaps you'd be willing to test 
the S/MIME functionality (especially since I haven't figured out /how/ 
to test it myself, given that I don't have an S/MIME cert nor have I 
figured out how to generate one or add one to my gpgsm keyring).

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

You can download the latest tarballs from the usual place at 
http://download.gnome.org/sources/gmime/2.5/

Enjoy!





Jeff