Moving pop, imap and smtp koslaves from kdebase to kdepim

[Marc Mutz]

On Monday 05 January 2004 19:37, Ralf Habacker wrote:
<snip>
> I like to share a little note from a users perspective. When I'm
> trying to build a new application the the only requirements are at
> least the qt lib and kdelibs, which supports already some io slaves
> like ftp http gzip bzip2 and file.  It seems to be very hard to
> explain the users, why they have to install kdepim to use such basic
> io slaves like pop3, smtp and so one.
<snip>

Those three slaves are not at all "basic". From at least KDE 2.2 where 
KMail was made to use these slaves instead of it's own smtp (and pop?) 
implementation, these slaves were used in connection-oriented mode 
unlike almost any other "basic" ioslave. Those two/three slaves share a 
metadata protocol to perform certain special commands whose application 
end is only implemented in KMail. The same goes for kio_nntp, which 
isn't even used by knode, and is probably completely non-functional by 
now.

The smtp slave contains some really ugly "I-want-to-be-sendmail" hacks 
(like rfc822 header generation) that I'd really like to get rid of as 
soon as possible. Moving it to kdepim would allow me to do that for 
kdepim-3.3. Consider this an official request from the current kio_smtp 
maintainer to move the slave to kdepim.

The IMAP slave is _very_ tightly coupled to KMail. Just watch the many 
simultaneous cross-CVS-module commits that are needed just to fix 
IMAP-related bugs, not speaking of implement new features. IIRC, both 
even share an enum (at least it was proposed they do not long ago)!

Summary: If you want to cleanup KDE's structure, move nntp, smtp, pop3, 
and imap (in order of increasing urgency) to kdepim/kioslaves.

Marc

-- 
Terrorist attacks are rare, and if the color-threat level changes
willy-nilly with no obvious cause or effect, then people will simply
stop paying attention. And the threat levels are publicly known, so
any terrorist with a lick of sense will simply wait until the threat
level goes down. -- Bruce Schneier, Crypto-Gram 07/2003