Re: [PATCH v2 6/6] imap-send: correctly report "host" when using "tunnel"

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2023 at 02:06:55AM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> >   Side note: If somebody were proposing to add imap-send at all today,
> >   I'd probably say "no, that should be a separate project, and you
> >   should probably write it in some language that has a decent imap
> >   library". It really has nothing at all to do with Git in terms of
> >   implementation, and I suspect it's not super well maintained in
> >   general. But perhaps it is too late for that.
> 
> I think it's a reasonable feature, but in hindsight our mistake was to
> think that we should be perma-forking isync, which has since moved
> on. I've used isync's "mbsync" extensively for IMAP in other contexts,
> and it works well for that.
> 
> So if we were going back to the drawing board a "git-imap-sync" really
> should just be something in our mail tooling that can produce a Maildir,
> and if we wanted an IMAP helper it could invoke mbsync, offlineimap or
> various other "maildir to IMAP" bidirectional syncing utilities to
> "send" via IMAP.
> 
> So, just some hook support for format-patch with some documented
> examples should do it, but I won't be working on that task...

Yes, I think format-patch plus a sync program would be good. I did
briefly look at the state of imap sync programs and was a bit
disappointed. Many older recommendations are for software that is no
longer packaged, or hard to find. And none of the ones I looked at do
something as simple as "copy these messages to this imap server".
They're all very interested in bidirectional sync, incremental updates,
and so on. But I do think one could make mbsync or offlineimap work, if
you used a dedicated folder on the server as the destination.

But yeah, I don't think you or I needs to come up with a solution there.
I was more proposing along the lines of: let's drop imap-send, and
interested people can then make a solution based on other tools, or even
spin off imap-send into its own repository.

But I get that even that is some work, and it may mean complaining
users.

-Peff