About merge-directive and SMTPConnection

[Aaron Bentley]

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Adeodato Simó wrote:
> Hello John (CC'ing the list in case somebody wants to comment).
> 
> I had a look at moving merge-directive to use SMTPConnection, and I
> found some issues:
> 
>   1. SMTPConnection can only create MIME messages, and I have no idea
>      whether the automatic merge tools can cope with that. Do you know
>      if this can be an issue?

The only automatic merge tool that currently supports merge directives
is Bundle Buggy, and it actually expects to find merge directives in an
attachment.

>   2. create_message() wants an unicode body, but that can't happen
>      because the diff is arbitrary 8bit data. So with the current
>      SMTPConnection API, only send_text_and_attachment_email can be
>      used, which would leave an empty first MIME part. Works, but sort
>      of ugly.

We should make sure there's a way to create bytestring bodies, either by
accepting bytestrings in create_message or by having a second function
for creating messages.  Since it's usually desirable to use unicode
bodies, it might make sense to have create_bytestring_message as a
second function.

>   3. With the current API, it seems clumsy not to send the mail from
>      where it's created, since otherwise you have to pass two objects
>      around, the smtp object, and the message. But this changes the
>      behavior of MergeDirective.to_email(), so that one needs to get
>      deprecated, and a new function introduced.
> 
> Do you have any comments on this? Personally I would bring into bzrlib a
> reduced SMTPConnection class, only with code for:
> 
>   1. reading the config for server/user/password
>   2. private functions for connecting, authenticating, etc.
>   3. a public method for sending a Message(), extracting the from and to
>      addresses from said Message, instead of passing them around as
>      arguments

I would not want to lose the functionality in
SMTPConnection._basic_message.  I don't care how it's done, I just want
to be able to specify a unicode from string, and not worry about
encoding it correctly.

Aaron
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