[PATCH/FEATURE] Per-user XLIST support for cyrus-imapd

[Thomas Jarosch]

On Wednesday, 1. May 2013 00:03:20 Bron Gondwana wrote:
> What are your main blockers to moving to 2.4?  I suspect the reindexing IO
> his is a major factor, and something I'd like to solve (by delaying the
> inevitable really... there are enough cache format changes that
> reindexing will be necessary at some point - but stopping the storm is
> important)

Surprisingly it's QA: We have many scripts and automated systems that 
integrate into cyrus (backup restore, automatic sieve script creation, new 
user creation etc) that need extensive testing. Some of those scripts have 
assumptions about internal cyrus stuff (sic!) like the hierarchy separator
or the filename / directory layout for performance reasons.

We already started writing autotest[1] tests for our cyrus subsystem,
but it's still too incomplete for a smooth upgrade test.

[1] http://autotest.github.io/

> > As far as I understood it, Outlook 2013 does not implement the RFC
> > properly. Or did I miss something? That's the thing we are trying to
> > solve here. Problem is you can't configure the sent mail folders
> > manually anymore. Grrr.
> I'm not certain actually - I'd have to have a look at your patches.  I
> know some clients expect to see flags in response to normal LIST commands
> as well, which is annoying - but we added an option to always return
> them, even to regular LIST.

ok

> I have no problem with people doing their own things.  We had our own
> separate notifications framework which we were running at FastMail for
> over a year before the eventsource stuff got merged upstream and we
> dropped our patches in favour of rewriting our notifdy to be an
> eventsource listener instead. Competing development is good.
> 
> In this particular case, the only reason I'm not interested in your
> patches instead of my own work is that I really want to allow the
> /shared/specialuse annotation to work rather than hard coding folder
> names in imapd.conf - and the reason I want THAT is because we need to
> support localisation of folder names pretty soon, and hence the xlist-*
> trick won't work any more.

localization is one of the reasons why we needed this per user, too.

We thought about storing the folder names inside an annotation too,
but since the specialuse stuff is in 2.5, it would have been
even more "wasted" time :)

The good side of storing this in a per-user config _file_ is easy access
for the administrator or third party scripts. Otherwise you need
another tool to manipulate the annotation (+authentication hassle).

> Besides, standards are good if they provide everything you need.
> 
> Thanks for your contributions, and for making them available.  Maybe
> they'll be useful to other people who aren't ready for 2.4/2.5 yet :)

exactly :)

Thomas