Re: imap.el and nnimap.el [was Re: Build failure bzr trunk revno 103260]

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> Gnus itself needs imap.el only in one place (mail-source.el) so I
> propose we move imap.el to Emacs and out of Gnus when and if that
> dependency is removed.  It's a general-purpose library anyway.

I wonder whether it might make some sense to re-separate out some of the
more basic IMAP stuff from nnimap.el again.  nnimap.el slurped in all
the protocol-specific stuff from imap.el so that it could implement what
Gnus needed more efficiently, but there isn't really much reason why,
say, the login functions (and related) could be separated out again.

Then non-Gnus packages could just use this new stripped-down basic IMAP
library.  I think, basically, what most useful is the login functions
and a simple `imap-command' function, and the rest would be application
specific.

I've had a peek at the relevant nnimap and mail-source functions, and it
seems like it should be doable in a pretty clean fashion.

However, if the new basic IMAP library is called imap.el, then this
would still break third-party applications.

Thoughts?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen