[Building Sakai] 2.9 Ideas: Include Mailsender in Sakai core?

[Carl Hall]

[see https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/MSND-35
 for preliminary discussion]

Hi David,

I will attempt to respond to your concerns inline.

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 2:16 PM, David Adams <da1 at vt.edu> wrote:

> Currently, Mailsender does not use the Sakai EmailService to send mail, but
> rather re-implements the service itself.
>

The basis for not using the central email service was that it didn't offer
the functionality required by Mailtool/Mailsender as well as other tools
(samigo, etc). I worked up patches to add this functionality and those have
been merged into the kernel releases.

In the 1.4 and 1.5 branches of Mailsender, we introduced the ability to use
our internal service (good for all sakai users) and the central email
service (good for users with the very latest patches). At the time, we had
some problems with this approach:

1) only the latest patch users of kernel could use the central email service
2) it was a terrible maintenance hassle to keep both going
3) most users didn't know what to use (or care) and simply chose the interal
service

Given these, Seth and I made an executive decision in Denver last year to
drop support for the central email service and to review this at a later
time. As stated in MSND-35, that time has come.

My other concern about Mailsender is that it doesn't seem to be actively
> under development. The only commit in 2011 was a minor pom.xml change.
>

Please don't confuse lack of commits with lack of maintenance. Mailsender
serves a very specific set of functionality and doesn't want to take on
feature bloat. Unit tests have been added to ensure stability and while
there are some outstanding JIRAs, there are no blockers. Seth and I are
looking at some new features being driven by Columbia and once we have the
patch sets worked out, those will be merged in. 2011 has been a slow year
for Mailsender development because the requests for changes have been near
nil.

Mailsender is a small tool and a tiny example of these problems that I see
> in a lot of places in Sakai. But I'd like to see future releases take steps
> towards increasing the quality and discipline in the codebase. Adding a tool
> like Mailsender in its current state would be going the wrong direction.
>

I share your concern with not using centrally offered services but much like
the change from maven 1 to maven 2 with Sakai 2.4 -> 2.5, Mailsender
suffered from legacy support of older running systems. As stated in MSND-35,
the time for review is ripe now that the supported platforms all run on some
version of the Sakai kernel.

I have just committed to trunk the first changes necessary to move
Mailsender away from its central email service. Compilation succeeds but
unit tests fail and many need to be ported which I plan to clear off in the
coming weeks once I'm back from holiday.
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