Maildir and Cygwin

[GARY VANSICKLE]

> Hello,
> 
>    I have been trying to fix a patch for maildir for Pine, and while
> thinking about this I recalled that support for Maildir in Cygwin (e.g
> Mutt) has been discussed a couple of times. It seems to be that the only
> thing stopping people from being able to use it is a agreement on the
> format of the name among the different programs that do maildir.
> Explicitly this means to deprecate the use of ":" in the filename. I've
> been testing the maildir patch (for Pine) and changing ":" to ";" works
> perfectly well, so I was wondering how compatible is this with other tools
> designed for maildir. I am not advocating for the use of ";", I am asking
> the questions as to "Can we agree to use something different than ':'?"
> and "Can we use ';'?".
> 
> Thanks for your feedback!
> 

Well first of all, remember that "managed" mounts do seem to allow Maildirs
to work on Cygwin, so that's an interim solution.  However, to get to the
core of the problem:

I guess it depends on who the "we" is, and how many "we"s there are.
Maildir is, AFAICT, less of a spec and more of a web page somebody put up.
I have no idea how many apps are using this format, though I guess the only
thing we care about for the most part is which Cygwin ports use it.  What
would be best though is to clean up the Maildir spec and push it upstream;
probably a rather Herculean task.

To have any chance of success, I'd almost guarantee[1] that any "Maildir 2"
spec would have to add more value than POSIX-compatible filenames.  I don't
know what that might be, but there's always something that can be improved
or added to anything.

As sometimes-maintainer of Mutt, I'm certainly willing to "agree to use
something different than ':'".  However, I'm also an upstream release
behind, and not seeing the light at the end of the no-time tunnel.

-- 
Gary R. Van Sickle
Brewer.  Patriot.
[1] This is not a guarantee.


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