[Logicmail-devel] Development status and direction

[Derek K. <dko...@lo...>]

So I'm sitting here in a local coffee shop place on a Sunday afternoon, and
getting ready to pack up.  I figured that since we now have mailing lists up
and running, I might as well get the conversation flowing a little more
freely than the occasional blog post or private e-mail.  If you've been
following the project website lately, it should be obvious that I now have 2
somewhat parallel development efforts (both with automated builds) going on
now.  So I'll comment on them separately:

 

LogicMail 1.1, "the maintenance branch":

-          Continuing to merge in translations from trunk, and adding
resource references for any other user-visible strings I find.  Most of the
normal screens are done.  Still have some error/status messages to do, and
the configuration screens (which have the most text to deal with).
Eventually, I'll need to get the translators to go over these resource files
once things stabilize

-          Merged in 4 contributed patches, #74, #75, #131, #132.  These
were provided by a user named "cls", who has not given me an e-mail address.

-          Still have some possible outstanding bugs to resolve (i.e. #133,
when servers need an authenticated user to not lie about capabilities)

-          May have a bug in POP message parsing, as seen on
Logicmail-users, still need to reproduce

-          Some of the above patches may need corresponding 2.0
implementations

-          May have some outstanding issues with international character
encoding for message composition (will affect 2.0 as well)

 

LogicMail 2.0, "trunk"

-          Implemented a quick fix for the Outbox so you can send mail
again.  This issue was a side-effect of some oversight in a major
refactoring that changed messages to be referenced by MessageToken objects
instead of the less clean FolderMessage objects.  Still need to make Outbox
a real persistable mailbox, but it will need a different implementation than
other local folders.  (outgoing messages need associated metadata, and
FileConnection (what other local mailboxes use) may have issues on some
devices/security policies)

-          Finally checked in a new Message Properties screen, to replace
the Message Properties dialog.  This makes it easier to show more detail
about a message, especially its MIME structure.

-          Currently planning the next major refactoring, which is a
necessary prerequisite to message caching, selective loading, and better
attachment handling.

o   This refactoring will completely separate the MIME structure tree of a
message from the actual content.

o   The plan is the strip all content out of the MessagePart class
hierarchy, keeping those objects to represent only structure and arguments
(i.e. MIME type/subtype, charset, filename, size, etc.)

o   Then a new MessageContent class hierarchy will be created to hold actual
content.  These will support selective loading, and be directly accessible
likely using the corresponding MessagePart as a key.

o   The whole message loading process will need major changes to support all
of this, especially since IMAP lets you retrieve the structure separately
from the content, but POP does not.

 

So what does this mean for everyone?  Well, I just gave you an exhaustive
dump of my current thought process.  (and since I work an unrelated job
doing other Java coding M-F, this won't get more than a few hours attention
here or there until next weekend)  How can everyone get involved?  Well,
this e-mail should hopefully start that discussion.  I'm thinking I can
start by delegating out some of the outstanding 1.1 activities, but there
probably are plenty of 2.0-related things that I could use help with too.

 

-Derek