Re: [sup-talk] sup-server

[Andrei Thorp <garoth@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 9:33 PM, Rich Lane <rlane@club.cc.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Excerpts from Andrei Thorp's message of Tue Dec 08 17:12:05 -0500 2009:
>> This really seems like it's in direct competition with the Wave
>> system... but Wave has a lot more support. And yes, Wave doesn't have
>> e-mail federation at the moment, but I think they plan to do that in
>> the future. So yes, I like the idea of a Sup server, I like being able
>> to access my (sup) mail from multiple computers, I like the idea of
>> having multiple UIs to the Sup Service... but I think that in the long
>> run, I'd feel just as good about a couple good open source UIs to
>> Google's Wave instead.
>
> I actually didn't think about this as being competition to Wave. The
> current implementation is much more narrowly scoped,

Yeah, if you're sticking strictly to e-mail, this is a much better idea.

> but the grand
> generic document store vision does bear a resemblance. I don't know how
> far down that road the project will go.

The slight trouble that I foresee would be when Wave does do e-mail
federation. I guess what I'm saying is that the future of this project
would be reliant on whether or not Wave takes over, incorporates all
of e-mail (as google seems to hope), and phases it out in the long
run. I know, I know, there will be blood when this starts to happen
(if it does). The reason that sup-server would have trouble if wave
became popular would be simply that your e-mail would be fetched by
wave servers and sup-server would not really have a place to be
inserted, unless it actually became a mail server with some
non-standard extensions (presumably for tagging, etc.). This might
actually be an interesting direction to take regardless, actually.
Upon thinking about how this might work, it seems a lot of data like
annotations, labels, etc. could be stored in non-standard e-mail
headers, and "sup clients" would just fetch the mail regularly and do
stuff with the extra headers they have. The annotation system could,
perhaps, list the line of the source + the annotation.The labels would
be just a plain list. Then, you could even write back to the mail
server your new headers with imap I guess?

> I don't want to lose mail client
> functionality for the sake of being as generic as Wave (I haven't seen
> any information on the subject, but I assume the translation to/from
> email is lossy).

I guess we don't know whether or not it would be lossy yet. I suppose
for the sake of wave internals (sending waves based on e-mails), there
will have to be a lot of stuff cut, like most of the e-mail data
fields (how would they know what the "to" person is when mapped to
wave?). However, for the sake of sending back out to the e-mail
system, they would probably store all of the relevant field data.

Anyway, a lot of this is speculative, and the e-mail vs. wave battle
of the future may not even happen because people are content enough
with e-mail. Or it may be far off, or who knows! And I could sure use
STS now to handle my mail in a sane way in the meanwhile.

Foods for Thoughts,

-Andrei Thorp

P.S. I'll be excited for the future of sup regardless of what happens.
I do honestly like this project a lot.
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