Re: nnmaildir.el + courier IMAP compatibility patch

[Matt Armstrong <matt@lickey.com>]

prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) writes:

> Matt Armstrong <matt@lickey.com> wrote:
>> prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) writes:
>>> I've occasionally thought of writing an IMAP server that would store
>>> marks in an nnmaildir-compatible way.
>>
>> I've occasionally thought of going the opposite direction and forking
>> your nnmaildir.el to be less inode intensive by storing marks using
>> the "experimental suffix" method described in the maildir spec,
>
> That would save you one inode per group, at most.  (In my setup, it
> would save one inode total.)

I didn't realize the marks were hard links.  I've got plenty of inodes
to spare.

Anyway, the performance problems I was seeing went away when I set
gnus-fetch-old-headers to nil.  I had it set to 25.  I think
gnus-fetch-old-headers causes a lot of fetches by message-id.  Perhaps
that is slowish with nnmaildir?  I was seeing 30 second group entry
times for a group with 2500 messages, about 25 ticked and none of them
new.  That is gone now and it is pretty zippy.


>>> How does Courier store marks?
>>
>> With the maildir standard ":2,XYZ" suffixes on the filenames
>
> Ok.  There are a few reasons nnmaildir doesn't do that: it can't
> accommodate all of Gnus's marks; using two different storage methods
> for different sets of marks would be pretty ugly; treating the
> filename as constant makes concurrent use much easier.

First, lemme be clear that I think this is a minor thing and that
nnmaildir is great and I'm thankful that you created it.  :-)

But, do you worry about concurrent use by other email clients?  It
seems like nnmaildir can't depend on the :2, suffix remaining constant
anyway.

If that is the case, then the only implementation difficulty is
storing some marks one way and some marks another.  But abstracting
that behind an API doesn't seem too difficult.

One argument against the "maildir way" of storing marks is that it
makes it less efficient to, say, find all the ticked articles.  You've
got to glob the whole cur directory instead of just the ticked marks
dir.

But I still like it as a feature.  Say I go on vacation for two weeks
and read mail via a web mail client that accesses my mail via IMAP.
It'd be great to come back to Gnus and have everything I read actually
marked read in Gnus.  Maybe if I want this I should just read via IMAP
at all times -- I would if it weren't slower.


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