Re: file storage in IMAP (eventually for Tramp) working and needs testing

[Michael Albinus]

Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:

> MA> I'm a little bit lost. Does it mean you don't want to offer *all*
> MA> messages in a mailbox?
>
> Correct, otherwise it's hard to handle invalid messages: are they
> invalid files or something else?  I wanted also to treat duplicates as
> automatic backups but if you don't like that idea then I'll drop it.

Maybe we should see real life examples. I don't know whether it is
always good to present selected contents only. If there are technical
restrictions - that's another game.

> MA> The more serious work with Tramp is that all file operations towards
> MA> IMAP must be mapped to Emacs' file name handler primitives like
> MA> file-local-copy or write-region. If you want, I could support you a
> MA> little bit(1) in writing a tramp-imap.el.
>
> Sure.  In fact trimp.el is tramp-imap.el, shortened :) The name is not
> important, if you want the latter.  Should it live in Tramp instead of
> Gnus?  If so, imap.el will be needed, and it's only in Emacs after 22 I
> believe.  Any opinions (Reiner?) are welcome.
>
> Let me know what pieces you need from me, and if there's an example in
> Tramp I should follow to implement this.

It would be nice if it could live in the Tramp repository. I'm not
fundamentalistic about names, but so far we have just tramp*.el files
there.

The only "piece" I would need from you are legal papers from the FSF for
Tramp and for Emacs. Guess you have it partly already because of gnus.

Once this is done, nothing will prevent you from writing in the Tramp CVS.

As starting point you might look at tramp-smb.el or tramp-gw.el. Both
are addons, like tramp-imap.el could be. tramp-fish.el might be examined
as well, but this method isn't used anywhere I believe - it was merely a
proof of concept I didn't want to throw away. And I never ever got a bug
report about ...

It wouldn't be a problem if imap.el is not present in all (X)Emacs
versions to be supported. tramp-gw.el lives with similar restrictions;
it is loaded only if some additional (external) packages are available.

I've added tramp-devel to the Cc, in order to answer the question from
your other message.

> Thanks
> Ted

Best regards, Michael.