[Python-Dev] Patch making the current email package (mostly) support bytes (original) (raw)

lutz at rmi.net lutz at rmi.net
Thu Oct 7 18:03:18 CEST 2010

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote (giving me an opening to jump in here):

R. David Murray writes: > In other words, my proposed patch only makes email5 1/8 to 1/4 > broken, instead of half broken as it is now. But not un-broken > enough for Mailman, it sounds like.

IMO, not in the long run. But realistically, in the applications I know of, most desired traffic is conformant, and since there aren't any Python 3 email apps yet, this isn't even a regression. :-/

Well, yes there are, and yes it is. As I pointed out in a thread on this list back in June, there are multiple large Python 3 email "apps" in the new Programming Python, a book which is about to be released, and which will be read by at least tens of thousands of people, many of whom will be evaluating the stability of Python 3.

These apps include both a simple webmail site, as well as a more sophisticated 5k-line tkinter email client -- one which I've been using for all my personal and business email over the last 6 months, and which works well with the email package as it is in 3.1 (albeit with a bit of workaround code). This includes support for Unicode, MIME, headers, attachments, and the lot.

I'm forwarding a link to the code of these clients to David by private email in case they might be useful as a test case (O'Reilly has already posted them ahead of the book, but they may be a bit too heavy for use in formal testing).

The email package is obviously less than ideal today, and there are many other clients for it besides my own, of course. But making it backward incompatible at this point is likely to be seen as a big negative to newcomers evaluating 3.X viability. And as I tried to make clear in June, this list should carefully weigh the PR cost of pulling the rug out from under those brave souls who have already taken the time to accommodate the 3.X world you've mandated.

To put that more strongly, the Python user base is much larger than this list's readership. If I'm using 3.1 email, so are many others. People will accept the 3.X world you make up to a point, but it's impossible to code to a moving target, much less base a product on it. At some point, they'll simply stop trying to keep up; in fact, some already have.

Fixes are a Good Thing, of course, and this particular change's scope remains to be seen; but to channel most of the users I meet out there in the real world today: Enough with the 3.X changes already, eh?

--Mark Lutz (http://learning-python.com, http://rmi.net/~lutz)

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