Re: packages with binaries
Uday S Reddy writes:
> Sure, but if you can't get a pretty good reading on that
from
> reviewing the program source, "open source" is meaningless.
I think VM was designed to be just free software. "Open source" is
a newer concept. I would agree that VM doesn't meet the standards
of open source. Perhaps, one day it will, if we keep rewriting
things. That is a good goal!
It's probably true that Kyle didn't care if anyone else could read his
code as long as he could. Nevertheless, I don't think that's good
practice, and I think it's worth worrying about "superficial" stuff
like syntax, nice and consistent indentation, and all the stuff that
the gurus (James Martin, Michael Jackson, et al) worry about and teach
CS undergrads.
The trunk version of VM you are using does not treat threading as a
form of
sorting any more.
Eh? I may be a few weeks behind, but in the version I synched to most
recently the ordering of the message list is still done in the basic
sort function. That just ain't right.
But, VM's algorithm was pretty similar to it already.
Not in several important respects, although I'll grant that the data
structures are similar.
VM predates Netscape, does it not? And, Jamie was a VM user. I
don't know if he still is.
Not since he started working for Netscape; he was their mail guru and
dogfooded.
All kinds of problems cropped up in the corner cases (dealing with
duplicate
copies of messages, or subject line changing in the middle of a thread etc.)
That latter shouldn't matter. If it does, the algorithm is not like
Jamie's.
and each of them took me ages to fix. I came to the point of
throwing away the old code and rewriting it from scratch several
times. But I was hopeful that the problems were minor and I was
converging on the right code. I think I did. But, still, I hope
to rewrite it from scratch some day and think about why it proved
to be so hard.
Well, you'd better get cracking, because I need to show my version to
Bill Janssen at Pycon in March (he's implementing it for the Python
email module :-).
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