[Python-Dev] Patch making the current email package (mostly) support bytes

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

R. David Murray writes:
 > On Sat, 09 Oct 2010 01:06:29 +0900, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
 > > That mess is entirely unnecessary in Python 3.  Text and wire format
 > > can be easily distinguished with three different representations of
 > > email: Unicode for the conceptual RFC 822 layer (of course this is an
 > > extension, because RFC 822 itself is strictly limited to the ASCII
 > > subset), bytes for wire format, and Message objects for modern
 > > structured mail (including MIME, etc).

 > That engineering is pretty much what we are looking at, although in
 > practice I think you have to hang wire-format and text-format bits off
 > of appropriate places in the model in order to keep everything properly
 > coordinated.

Right.  That's where I was going with my comment to Barry about the
Received headers.  Even if email isn't going to serve clients working
with wire format, it needs to deal with those headers.  But where I
think the headers defined by RFC 822 should be stored as str in
email6, I am leaning toward storing Received headers verbatim as bytes
(including any RFC 822 folding whitespace) because of the RFC 5321
requirement that they be preserved exactly.