[imap5] Existing RFCs - what do they solve, and how to solve those problems

[Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>]

Before building something new, it helps understand what's already been
done and what problems it's solving - since I won't have seen every
problem that everyone is having.  I'm probably not the best standards
writer or the best programmer out there - but I'm driven do this bloody
thing!

I plan to build a list of all the RFCs which refer to the communications
between clients and servers.  http://www.imc.org/rfcs.html is a good
starting point.  I want to capture things like ACAP and SIEVE as well.

I plan to build a table with:

a) RFC Number and title
b) Problem being solved
c) Plan to handle that same problem

Now it may be that (c) is "won't deal with it", or "won't exist because
it's a workaround for a deficiency which won't exist".  I'm hoping for
more of the latter.

I went to a great talk by Damien Conway about rewriting all his CPAN
Perl modules for Perl6 (yes, yes - I know, it doesn't even exist yet).
Fully half of his modules were workarounds for deficiencies in perl5
which just don't exist in perl6, so they don't need to be ported.
Of the rest, many were cut down to fewer than half the number of lines
of code due to the increased expressivity of the new language.

I hope many of the extension RFCs for IMAP will fall under the same
patterns - simpler to implement if required at all.

I'll post more here as the list of RFCs is put together.  I'm
particularly hoping to make sure I don't miss any relevant RFCs:

http://imapwiki.org/ImapRFCList

Bron.