JSMime status update

This post is admittedly long overdue, but I kept wanting to delay this post until I actually had patches up for review. But I have the tendency to want to post nothing until I verify that the entire pipeline consisting of over 5,000 lines of changes is fully correct and documented. However, I'm now confident in all but roughly three of my major changes, so patch documentation and redistribution is (hopefully) all that remains before I start saturating all of the reviewers in Thunderbird with this code. An ironic thing to note is that these changes are actually largely a sidetrack from my original goal: I wanted to land my charset-conversion patch, but I first thought it would be helpful to test with nsIMimeConverter using the new method, which required me to implement header parsing, which is best tested with nsIMsgHeaderParser, which turns out to have needed very major changes.

As you might have gathered, I am getting ready to land a major set of changes. This set of changes is being tracked in bugs 790855, 842632, and 858337. These patches are implementing structured header parsing and emission, as well as RFC 2047 decoding and encoding. My goal still remains to land all of these changes by Thunderbird 24, reviewers permitting.

The first part of JSMime landed back in Thunderbird 21, so anyone using the betas is already using part of it. One of the small auxiliary interfaces (nsIMimeHeaders) was switched over to the JS implementation instead of libmime's implementation, as well as the ad-hoc ones used in our test suites. The currently pending changes would use JSMime for the other auxiliary interfaces, nsIMimeConverter (which does RFC 2047 processing) and nsIMsgHeaderParser (which does structured processing of the addressing headers). The changes to the latter are very much API-breaking, requiring me to audit and fix every single callsite in all of comm-central. On the plus side, thanks to my changes, I know I will incidentally be fixing several bugs such as quoting issues in the compose windows, a valgrind error in nsSmtpProtocol.cpp, or the space-in-2047-encoded-words issue.

It's not all the changes, although being able to outright remove 2000 lines of libmime is certainly a welcome change. The brunt of libmime remains the code that is related to the processing of email body parts into the final email display method, which is the next target of my patches and which I originally intended to fix before I got sidetracked. Getting sidetracked isn't altogether a bad thing, since, for the first time, it lets me identify things that can be done in parallel with this work.

A useful change I've identified that is even more invasive than everything else to date would be to alter our view of how message headers work. Right now, we tend to retrieve headers (from, say, nsIMsgDBHdr) as strings, where the consumer will use a standard API to reparse them before acting on their contents. A saner solution is to move the structured parsing into the retrieval APIs, by making an msgIStructuredHeaders interface, retrievable from nsIMsgDBHdr and nsIMsgCompFields from which you can manipulate headers in their structured form instead of their string from. It's even more useful on nsIMsgCompFields, where keeping things in structured form as long as possible is desirable (I particularly want to kill nsIMsgCompFields.splitRecipients as an API).

Another useful change is that our underlying parsing code can properly handle groups, which means we can start using groups to handle mailing lists in our code instead of…the mess we have now. The current implementation sticks mailing lists as individual addresses to be expanded by code in the middle of the compose sequence, which is fragile and suboptimal.

The last useful independent change I can think of is rewriting the addressing widget in the compose frontend to store things internally in a structured form instead of the MIME header kludge it currently uses; this kind of work could also be shared with the similar annoying mailing list editing UI.

As for myself, I will be working on the body part conversion process. I haven't yet finalized the API that extensions will get to use here, as I need to do a lot of playing around with the current implementation to see how flexible it is. The last two entry points into libmime, the stream converter and Gloda, will first be controlled by preference, so that I can land partially-working versions before I land everything that is necessary. My goal is to land a functionality-complete implementation by Thunderbird 31 (i.e., the next ESR branch after 24), so that I can remove the old implementation in Thunderbird 32, but that timescale may still be too aggressive.