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

[Matthew Jones]

Comments inline!

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 1:59 PM, Carl Hall <carl at hallwaytech.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> . . .
> 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.
>

We really should have a better policy (specifically for contrib tools) on
how to handle compatibility issues. The best way I've found is either to use
wrappers which are only activated by specific maven profiles (sakai-2.7,
sakai-2.8) or by using reflection. This is extra work for the tool developer
but much less than maintaining multiple versions of the code. This is
usually the suggestions made for Android Backward compatibility guide.  [1]

Sometimes this isn't always possible, like if you need to extend interfaces
or if new methods are added, or if you need serious performance, but I think
for the vast majority of compatibility problems we (Sakai in general) should
have a better guidelines and make it easier developers not to worry about
this. Usually the api is pretty backward compatible to begin with and you
only have to "add" to it, like in this case, if you need something that
isn't there. This *can* be done with the build-helper-maven-plugin or
careful packaging of dependencies and profiles, but I don't know how well
this is documented.

I also believe as external api's (like entitybroker and webservices) get
more fleshed out, we'll eventually have to start versioning these and
providing some type of built-in backward compatibility. We can't rely on
having to have every external application which connects to these to upgrade
at the exact same time as the main system upgrades, and we also can't keep
old api's upgraded forever. For example, google has depreciated maps api V2
and is no longer supporting V1.  I think we should at *least* have a 2.7 API
that still *works* when someone is running a 2.8 instance. Anyway something
to think about. ;)

I also agree with Carl's other comments. Michigan has been running
mailsender instead of mailtool for years now without any issue. If there was
a blocker or critical and wasn't getting addressed, we would fix it. I think
a strong +1 for inclusion in any tool into the core is "how many places with
developers on staff are running this tool as part of their core
distribution". Many projects don't appear to have too much activity, but if
they are running somewhere where there are developers I'm sure any serious
issues are at least getting maintained though maybe not any more features as
Carl said. ;)

[1]
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/backward-compatibility-for-android.html
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