Re: Archiving large NNML groups quickly.

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Kai Großjohann wrote:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
> 
> > IMHO the active file should be eliminated, and a ".active" file in
> > each nnml group should be used instead.
> 
> This means that Gnus has to recursively search ~/Mail, at least if
> long file names are not in effect.  This could be quite slow.

No recursive searching is needed, I think, just use the subscribed group
name in Gnus to find the filename.  Of course, instead of reading only 1
file (active) you need to read N files, but it is only necessary to do it
once and after that keep things in memory -- right now the active file is
often read from disk.  So in the end, it would probably be about the same
speed.  When listing all groups, a recursive find is needed though.

Or maybe the active file should simply be removed completely (not replaced
by .active), the active info could be kept in .newsrc.eld (.marks)  
instead.  If we change the format of .marks it would even be simple to
manipulate it from shell/perl scripts.  Hm, what do you think?