When I made the checkin of the provisional email policy, I knew that
Address and Group needed to be made accessible from somewhere. The more
I looked at it, though, the more it became clear that since this is a
provisional API anyway, there's no good reason to hide headerregistry as
a private API. It was designed to ultimately be part of the public API,
and so it should be part of the provisional API.
This patch fully documents the headerregistry API, and deletes the
abbreviated version of those docs I had added to the provisional policy
docs.
When the new policies are used (and only when the new policies are explicitly
used) headers turn into objects that have attributes based on their parsed
values, and can be set using objects that encapsulate the values, as well as
set directly from unicode strings. The folding algorithm then takes care of
encoding unicode where needed, and folding according to the highest level
syntactic objects.
With this patch only date and time headers are parsed as anything other than
unstructured, but that is all the helper methods in the existing API handle.
I do plan to add more parsers, and complete the set specified in the RFC
before the package becomes stable.
R David Murray