Re: Maildir backend

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Jérôme Marant <jerome.marant@fr.thalesgroup.com> wrote:
>   They should not be mandatory and they take too much room
>   on my system.

I don't know how you're measuring the total size, but there's a good
chance the measurement you have is inaccurately high.  The files used
to store marks are actually hard links to a single file, so each
additional mark file doesn't take up any more space except for storing
its name in the directory.  No additional inodes are used.

The NOV information does take up extra inodes and space, possibly
quite a bit depending on what filesystem you use.  It's there only to
speed things up; it doesn't affect the behavior.  So you can do
"rm server-directory/*/.nnmaildir/nov/*" between (or even during) Gnus
sessions to save space if you're willing to accept the performance
hit.  I could also change nnmaildir so that if it's unable to write
the NOV files, it continues on anyway.  Then you could do
"chmod a-w server-directory/*/.nnmaildir/nov" just once and new NOV
files wouldn't be created.  That change shouldn't be too hard.

>   Would you mind explaining what in nnmaildir has to be modified in
>   order to have, for instance, a filename based maildir backend ?

Storing marks in the filenames, you mean?  -request-set-mark and
-request-update-info would have to be changed, at least.  I'm not sure
about anything else.


paul