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On 08/09/2010 08:05 PM, JoeS wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4C60C205.8020800@gmail.com" type="cite">
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On 8/9/2010 10:00 PM, Andrew Sutherland wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4C60B2AE.7060702@asutherland.org"
type="cite"> If something happened where our options were
between sinking a non-trivial amount of MoMo man-hours into NNTP
or removing the current C++ implementation, I believe we would
remove it.</blockquote>
Well, that "something" hasn't happened, and NTTP being a long
established protocol, that hasn't changed in years, that event is
very unlikely<br>
to happen. So why mention it as if it is a drain on resources.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Indeed, none of the changes we have made so far have affected the
back-end or front-end in such a way that major refactoring work
would have been required to the NNTP implementation to keep it
working.<br>
<br>
But that is not to say it has not slowed us down. I know I spent a
serious amount of time trying to get additional arguments for the
NNTP message streaming process through the convoluted URI/service
mechanism so that gloda could index newsgroup messages. I did
manage to get the information through, but I also apparently managed
to regress handling of newsgroup attachments. This was not an
obvious thing because of the lack of test coverage. I believe I've
also spent numerous hours investigating crashers and pathological
behavior that required consideration of the news codebase. I have
observed other developers spending time on issues specific to the
NNTP implementation, as well.<br>
<br>
The reason such things are worth mentioning is because we are now
beginning to make back-end changes and front-end changes that could
force the issue and because there seemed to be the impression that
many of the Thunderbird developers have a problem with NNTP itself.
Because the mailnews database bits are reasonably abstracted from
the protocol bits, I'm not expecting bienvenu's back-end changes to
be that event, but the option needs to be on the table. Likewise,
the current 3-pane UI implementation will probably outlive us all,
but a lot of the new UI experiments are gloda-centric and so the
current news implementation will be invisible to them. (And making
the current news implementation visible to gloda is not a small
undertaking; most of the work in gloda was in dealing with all the
complexities of the POP and IMAP implementations.)<br>
<br>
Andrew<br>
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