[dev] identities

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:
> 
> Thinking about it, I think "identities" are tied enough to IMP that 
> they should be seperate from "credentials", though it'd be cool 
> if we could tie them together somehow. Some design work needs 
> to be done on how all of this will work (and be stored), but 
> I think it's definitely worth pursuing.
> 

Are identities tied into IMP though?  I'd say they are tied into
the preferences system more than any individual module.  If you can
share preferences across modules, then several could apply to more
than just IMP (Turba comes to mind pretty much immediately)

The best way to consider identities may just be a 'subclass'
of preferences.

Doing this .qmail style might work.  If you consider the below list
to be some abstract namespace (i.e., ignoring implementation issues), 
then if you fall through them one-by-one until you hit one that is
defined, you have the value of your preference. 

So for example, if I am user 'avsm' logging into the server 'recoil',
and have the identity 'work', it will search for the following
preferences in the backend:

a) imp.recoil.avsm.work.fullname = 'anil @work'
b) imp.recoil.avsm.fullname = 'anil madhavapeddy'
c) imp.recoil.defaults.fullname = 'random recoil dude/dudette'
d) imp.defaults.fullname = 'totally default user'

If a) isnt found (that is, I haven't defined a different fullname
for my work identity), it will fall back to my user-level preference
of b)  And if that isn't found, it'll fall back to the server defaults,
and then the global defaults.

This way, it should be pretty simple to override specific
stuff for an identity, but still retain the flexibility of 
defaults.  If a server admin didnt want users changing their
full names, then the .recoil.defaults.fullname could be made
'sticky', so that it would apply all the way up the chain to b) and a)

You're right though, this stuff needs a Horde-level login before it'll 
really work... hmm.  Once that is there though, I get the feeling
that preferences and credentials are pretty closely tied together,
or ought to be.  I've not looked at the existing LDAP backends very
much yet either, so I'm busy setting up a Cyrus/LDAP development
environment so I can actually see what Jon/you see in addition to my
usual Courier-IMAP/MySQL :-)

> > I think this would be cool to have in IMP.  A friend of mine said that
> > pine is the only client he knows that does this... it would be cool if we
> > had it too.
> 
> Nah, Mulberry has had it for a while...
> 

Mulberry - do you use it under Win32?  The only decent IMAP client
Ive been able to find for Win32 is Outlook 2000 so far, and that's not
very decent :-)

--                      
 Anil Madhavapeddy / "I told you not to flush that!" 
 anil@recoil.org   /    Stern Lecture Plumbing