[Email-SIG] API thoughts

[R. David Murray]

On Wed, 02 Mar 2011 21:40:39 +0100, Steffen Daode Nurpmeso <sdaoden at googlemail.com> wrote:
> But if "what goes in .defects[]" will be configurable i would hope 
> for a generic is_malformed() and maybe is_processable() or the 
> like, i.e. state versus (translatable?) user-info.

I'm not sure what you are asking for here.  I think "if msg.is_malformed()"
is spelled "if msg.defects".  That is, if the defects list is non-empty,
the message is technically malformed.  Of course, that information by
itself isn't necessarily useful, which is why defects is a list
of defects.  "is_processable" lies in the eyes of the application.
What defects is it capable of dealing with?  The email package
can't know that.  So, again, that's why defects is a list.

Let me clarify what I mean by the policy controlling "what, exactly, is
a defect".  The idea here is that when parsing an email, each deviance
from the RFCs counts as a defect (the current email package, by the way,
only detects a small number of such defects!).  But when parsing, say,
an http stream, non-ascii characters in headers are perfectly legal.
So it seems to make sense that the HTTP policy would change what counts
as a defect during the operation of the parser.

> (The more i think about it the more i agree with David (i hope 
> i don't lie about that) that it's a waste of time to try to 
> convert malformed data to a compliant state, especially if the 
> package is - by design - capable to spit out the data the very 
> same way it came in.  Someone will take care - and throw it away.)

Well, I think we may provide some tools to do such "fixups" when it is
possible and the application wants it.  But they should be app-requested
transformations, not automatic ones.

> Unfortunately my non-hate mail seems to have been mistreated as 
> spam 8-}, therefore i wrote all of the above just to thank David 
> once again for making the email and mailbox packages usable 
> already in Python 3.2.  Thanks.

You are welcome :)

--David