Re: [PATCH 6/8] imap-send: change msg_data from storing (char *, len) to storing strbuf

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 01:30:54PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > For some reason, there is a bunch of infrastructure in this file for
> > dealing with IMAP flags, although there is nothing in the code that
> > actually allows any flags to be set.  If there is no plan to add
> > support for flags in the future, a bunch of code could be ripped out
> > and "struct msg_data" could be completely replaced with strbuf.
> 
> Yeah, after all these years we have kept the unused flags field
> there and nobody needed anything out of it.  I am OK with a removal
> if it is done at the very end of the series.

There's a bunch of unused junk in imap-send. The original implementation
copied a bunch of code from isync, a much more full-featured imap
client, and the result ended up way more complex than it needed to be. I
have ripped a few things out over the years when they cause a problem
(e.g., portability of /dev/urandom, conflict over the name "struct
string_list"), but have mostly let it be out of a vague sense that we
might one day want to pull bugfixes from isync upstream.

That has not happened once in the last six years, though, and I would
doubt that a straightforward merge would work after so many years. So
ripping out and refactoring the code in the name of maintainability is
probably a good thing at this point.

-Peff