Re: Plans for email 6.0

At 07:54 -0500 2009/04/02, Barry Warsaw wrote:
 ...
>...Here's a rambling of some of my thoughts on things we should do.
 ...

>* Bytes and string interfaces.  This is the trickiest one.  I think
>that internally, header names and values, and payloads should all be
>represented as bytes.  But APIs should accept bytes and strings,
>converting to bytes on input, and provide APIs to extract information
>as either bytes or strings.  I've thought about a few ways to do this
>cleanly, but haven't found anything I particularly like yet.  Remember
>that in email in Py2 is horribly broken in its discrimination between
>bytes and strings, but Py3 forces us to make a choice (which is a good
>thing).

AIUI, this or something like it must be done soon, as the email package is
broken on 3.x now.


>* Clean up the API.  Where possible, simple attribute access should be
>the norm.  Let's get rid of dumb API decisions (like str(msg)
>including the Unix-From).  Let's fix the whole
>get_payload(decode=True) debacle.  Let's fix stuff like needing to
>specify unicode encodings twice in the same call.  Etc.

Sounds good.  I'd like __setitem__ (msg[hdr] = foo) to act more like a
mapping, and not just append new header fields, with .replace_header() and
.add_header() folded together as .set_header().


>* Add an external storage API so that messages with huge binary
>payloads don't need to be fully stored in memory.
>
>* Let's target Python 3.1 (coming very soon) if possible, or Python
>3.2 if not.  We should back port email 6.0 to Python 2.x, though we'll
>have to decide how far back we should go (my suggestion: no earlier
>than Python 2.5).

Python 3.1 should have a working email package, and a simple way for users
needing more to get a better replacement (which they'd install as a
site-package).  I think that a sane split between bytes and string (or
string and Unicode on 2.x) is most needed.


>* Fix the myriad of bugs in the tracker!

Sure, I'm game!  We 2.x users would benefit.  Again, a place for users to
get an "official" current package is needed, as 2.7 is a ways off.
-- 
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