Re: [9fans] Acme Mail

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

On Tue May 25 21:56:49 EDT 2010, lyndon@orthanc.ca wrote:
> > Nedmail and acme Mail are operating on the same
> > mailbox, and nedmail already has a nice language
> > built in.  Back when I did that sort of thing, I found
> > it easy to just fire up nedmail in a shell window.
>
> But ultimatly this sort of functionality should be in upas/fs itself,
> driven by commands written to /mail/fs/ctl.

i'd like to disagree, and say this is a ui (ned/Mail/imap4
client) problem, but the current setup is already less
than optimal.

admittedly, minooka is no longer a fast machine, but
here's a fairly generic mailbox in use every day

minooka; time upas/fs -pf /mail/box/xx/mbox
1.12u 0.14s 3.23r 	 upas/fs -pf /mail/box/xx/mbox
minooka; echo q | time upas/nedmail
22875 messages
: 0.40u 2.95s 8.56r 	 upas/nedmail

that's a pretty long wait for ned to get the skinny on
the 22875th message, which i have an approximately
0.27182% chance of reading.

if you don't care about fast, at just over 1k of
memory/message, ned is using 28mb of memory.  that
seems like a lot when i haven't looked at any messages.

it makes more sense to get the skinny on the next n
messages, akin to page's cache.  but in order to do
that, the next n messages need to be obvious without
poking through the whole pile in order to sort.

which leads us directly to lyndon's point.

- erik