Roadmap 2024

[Benjamin Lamowski]

Hi everybody,

> It would be great to revive the email user-agent topic. Could this 
> endeavour be a welcome opportunity to stress Goa's new Rust support by 
> experimenting with (existing?) Rust-based protocol implementations 
> (IMAP, SMTP...) as building blocks? Ben wondered about a natural place 
> for Rust in our picture. I sense that this use case could provide us 
> with a tangible way to let the combination of Rust with Genode shine.

I haven't personally used it, but runt[1], an isync[2]-like
IMAP <-> Maildir synchronization tool, could maybe be a useful building
for Stefan's (mutt) setup on Genode. However it seems that runt is being
even less actively developed than isync.
Moving towards a custom GUI, himalaya[3] is a CLI email client that
could probably be wired up similarly to the recent SIP client GUI[4].
Finally, rust-imap[5] as a library is rumored to be of good quality.
As Michael R. Elkins observed[6], it's not easy to build a decent email
client. I think on the one hand, email is indeed a use case where
Genode-style decoupling of components really could shine. On the other
hand, I believe it's important to set a reasonably narrow scope, 
especially if we're building our own GUI like Stefan suggested.

As for my Rust aspirations, I guess how deeply using Rust in this 
context will touch native Genode interfaces strongly depends on the
runtimes chosen in the different building blocks (porting of a Posix
program vs. native library, use of something like the Terminal Crosslink
vs. Genode IPC and Dataspaces etc.)
I think a deeper exploration of the email client roadmap idea would best
be done in person, it sure seems an interesting way to explore native 
Genode components and Rust!

Best wishes,

Ben


[1] https://github.com/mordak/runt
[2] https://isync.sourceforge.io/
[3] https://github.com/soywod/himalaya
[4] https://genodians.org/jws/2023-11-16-sip-client-for-genode
[5] https://github.com/jonhoo/rust-imap
[6] "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." -me, circa 1995
     http://www.mutt.org/

-- 
Benjamin Lamowski
Genode Labs

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