[Email-SIG] fixing the current email module

[Barry Warsaw]

On Oct 3, 2009, at 9:26 AM, Timothy Farrell wrote:

> Back in June, David Murray posted the message below about fixing the  
> email module.  I have an interest in helping with this due to a  
> personal project I'm working on.  However, my ability to help is  
> severely limited by my understanding of email and MIME RFCs.
>
> David asked the question of whether or not passing strings to the  
> feedparser is a needed behavior.  I don't claim to have enough  
> knowledge to answer the question yes or no, but I would urge us all  
> to consider that if no answer shows up that David's patch should be  
> put in for no better reason than that it's better than what we  
> currently have.

I expect RDM to have some follow ups soon, but I'll put this forward  
in the meantime.

I firmly believe we need parallel feedparser APIs, one for feeding it  
strings and one for feeding it bytes.  In all the tentative attempts  
at Python3-ification I've done I just keep coming back to that  
assessment.  I don't think it's a terrible burden either since I also  
firmly believe that /internally/ the email package should be bytes- 
oriented.  So the basic model is: accept strings or bytes at the  
edges, process everything internally as bytes, output strings and  
bytes at the edges.

-Barry

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