Re: Rework of mbox provider

Countach wrote:
>> The primary goal of the JavaMail API design for message stores was to 
>> model the IMAP4 specification as closely as possible. In IMAP4, you 
>> can have many different kinds of separators for folders; in fact, you 
>> can have different separators for different folders in the same store 
>> - that's why getSeparator is a method on Folder not Store. So clients 
>> should expect folder path names to be pretty opaque and specific to 
>> the store.
>
>
> I agree! Specific to the store. The issue is that when you access the 
> store from different platform, the MBOX separators will change, 
> whereas the IMAP ones won't. Thus the separator is not specific to the 
> store at all, it is specific to the platform. It doesn't bother me  
> what wierd algorithm might be used to select the separator, what 
> bothers me is that the separator is different when accessed on 
> different platforms.

You misunderstand me: when I say specific to the store, I mean to the 
instance of the store not the Store implementation.

In one IMAP store you might have folders called

	INBOX/Saved/January
	#news/comp.lang.java

Note that "java" is the folder name here with 3 ancestors. You can mix 
and match different separators even in the same store.

>> The only real requirement is that you can always retrieve the same 
>> folder again by passing the name it returns from getFullName into the 
>> Store's getFolder method.
>
>
> I agree! But this requirement fails when the store (aka directory) is 
> moved to a different platform.

In which case it is not the same store.

>> If what you want is a consistent representation of paths, JavaMail 
>> offers that at well, in the form of the URLName. You can retrieve a 
>> URLName identifying a particular folder, and you can retrieve that 
>> folder from the store using the URLName. The path separator in 
>> URLNames is always '/'.
>
>
> No good. The getURLName function returns the absolute pathname of the 
> mbox where it happens to be mounted on this particular machine at this 
> particular time.  The getFullName function on the other hand is meant 
> to return the name of the folder RELATIVE to the root of the 
> hierarchy. This is the string that could be potentially be platform 
> independent if it was so designed.

You're partially right, but getURLName should also yield a pathname 
relative to the root of the hierarchy. Neither of these is currently 
the case with the mbox folder, but I will correct both.
-- 
Chris Burdess