[Twisted-Python] twisted.news cleanups and tests

[Tim Allen]

On Sunday, Apr 13, 2003, at 16:16 Australia/Sydney, Glyph Lefkowitz 
wrote:

<snip>

> twisted.im also needs to be refactored, in order to make its API more 
> coherent and easier to register observers of.  However, it remains 
> unclear whether this kind of functionality actually deserves a 
> separate package (that .words will use) or whether it will go into 
> .words directly.  Moshe has me mostly convinced that it should remain 
> an independant package, since real-time-client code is going to look 
> significantly different to abstract-message-processing-and-forwarding 
> code.
>
> Thoughts?

I'll be watching this with interest. I'm not going to say it's 
impossible or crazy, but I'd like to see how all the inherent 
difficulties in making a "generic messagey thing" are overcome.

 From the top of my head:
  - IMAP and NNTP have a bunch of folders, POP3 has just one.
  - IMAP lets you create folders and move messages about, NNTP doesn't.
  - Instant messaging apps have no folders, but you could no doubt 
synthesise an 'inbox'. Some IM systems let you have 'categories' of 
buddies, which you might present as message folders. However, then IM 
has the restriction that a given folder can only contain messages from 
one recipient, which is not the case with IMAP or NNTP.
  - POP3 and NNTP need to be polled for new messages, IM protocols alert 
you when a new message comes in. I'm not sure which way IMAP goes.
  - Email and usenet messages generally have a variety of interesting 
and useful headers that end-user applications are going to want to look 
at, IM messages do not.
  - IMAP and IM are stateful protocols, POP3 is not. I'm not sure about 
NNTP.
  - Email and usenet messages have message-threading, IM does not.

I can't see any sort of 'core feature set' and 'extension feature set' 
in the above list, more like every protocol and format cherry-picks the 
features it wants from a central store.

Another idea - of the various communication sources I personally use, 
they generally fall into 'IM-style (ICQ, IRC)' and 'email-style (email, 
usenet)' interfaces. One message source that I read in email-style that 
I have not yet seen mentioned is RSS. That would be an interesting 
thing to add to  a Universal Messaging client, wouldn't it? :)