More on rewrites

No one can deny that mailnews needs some rewrites pretty badly. The address book is getting an overhaul right now. Message databases are planned to have a second overhaul soon; thoughts are starting to fly around for an account manager rewrite as well. RSS gets one as well. Compose, MIME, and news code all need rewrites as well. Obviously, most are going to miss TB 3. Address book looks set to make it; ditto with kill-RDF; RSS will also probably slide in. Everyone else gets to wait for TB 4—or even later.

As I have mentioned before, I am in the midst of rewriting address book. The ultimate goal is to replace mork with mozStorage. But the interfaces are a large barrier in implementing these. So bug 382876 is blocked by bug 413260. No sane person would put all of the changes into one patch though, it's just too many. I therefore expect bug 413260 to have three or four patches fixing up one part of the story. And these are not going to be small by any stretch of the imagination: the first part alone is -2000/+1000 lines of code. And all that does is modify nsIAbCard.

Second and third in bug 413260 involve two more interfaces. The second part will be to implement the new nsIAbDirectory, which will involve cleaning up usages of nsIAbMDBDirectory and nsIAddrDatabase. I expect that to end up with 1000 lines of changes at least. The third part is to clean up the mailing list mess; this change is, in my opinion, the most important change of the interface setup. Finally is the maybe-fourth part, implementing the refactored changes into LDAP code.

After getting three or four large patches for bug 413260 committed comes the large patch for bug 382876, which needs some modifications to morkreader as well(which I hopefully won't have to write!). Finishing that allows me to start on message databases. It looks as if some of the ideas surrounding bug 11050 won't be touched until TB 4 simply for the sake of not overloading people with so many rewrites in such a short time.

Finally come the other slew of rewrites. jminta is so kindly doing kill-RDF. Other people are working on the RSS changes; I haven't used RSS on my Trunk builds yet, so I can't evaluate any changes since 2.0 yet nor will I likely do so for some time. Rewriting news code is a nice distraction when I'm frustrated at other code; however I am waiting for permission to really axe large chunks of it before do serious work on it. Compose and MIME get no love at the moment. And the account manager has to wait for agreement before it gets its rewrite: the most people can agree on at this point is that "it needs to change." And so life continues...