[dev] Potential packaging of IMP

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:

> As Jan has mentioned, some of us are working on some pretty big changes
> to Horde/IMP right now. As part of this, I'd like to propose
> abstracting away a large part of what is currently IMP, to make it
> easier to maintain the current working UI for folks using HEAD, while
> also making MIMP development easier.
>
> Basically, I'd like to move as much of IMP's code as possible into a
> Horde_App_Mail package. IMP would become the UI on top of that code;
> MIMP would simply be an alternate UI (avoiding a ton of duplicate code
> we have right now), and the new work that Jan and myself and others are
> working on would be a third.
>
> It's a decent amount of work, but I think there are large benefits to
> it development-wise and for people doing custom UIs. Thoughts?
> Objections?

I've been thinking about this for awhile, and agree it is a great idea 
but not without some large potholes and wholesale refactoring of code.  
Additionally, we may lose some of the lightweightness (is that a word?) 
of MIMP.  But, there will always be tradeoffs and code maintainability 
is a worthy goal.

Quite frankly, there will probably be much code in lib/ that does not 
need to be touched for this move as it has already been abstracted out 
into Horde libraries.  There is a bunch more code that would have 
already been abstracted out if not for BC.  This abstraction would 
pretty much require 3.1 to be the last relase cycle in the current 
version.

michael

_______________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at curecanti.org]