Re: Question about article identification and backends.

[Andreas Fuchs <asf@void.at>]

Today, Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> wrote:
> I had been thinking about this for a while, but this paper (posted by
> Andreas) talks about something similar.  Although it uses
> hash/timestamp for the unique ids (I think you'd also want to include
> the headers in the hash, at least for the UID), for most purposes, I
> suspect even just a simple monotonically increasing integer serial
> number would be sufficient.

I fear not - concurrency issues would make the whole thing fall apart.

Message A arrives at host x; gets next free number, 23.
Message B arrives at host y; gets next free number, 23.
You rsync messages from x -> y; Disaster.

The basic idea behind this is that you don't need to assign
pseudo-unique identities to messages because they are unique by
themselves (more or less, but MD5 should give a pretty good
approximation of unique for the purpose of mail storage).

The only problem I see with this approach is that you don't get a clean
number<->article-id mapping; nnmaildir's solution to this problem might
also apply for integrating the RMS into gnus.

Any takers? (-;
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, <asf@acm.org>, asf@jabber.at, antifuchs
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