Re: nnmaildir.el + courier IMAP compatibility patch

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

Matt Armstrong <matt@lickey.com> wrote:
> 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 wouldn't expect so.  elp is our friend.

> 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.

nnmaildir is not designed to work concurrently with programs that
change the message filenames.  But it's ok to run those programs
non-concurrently, between Gnus sessions.  Marks won't be shared, but
nothing should break.

> 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.

Right.  Also, if you want concurrent access, you can't assume the
filename is constant even within a session, so you may have to rescan
the directory just to find a message, even when you already know the
unique part of the name.

> 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.

That makes a case for having a common mark scheme, but not for any one
particular mark scheme. :/  It probably wouldn't be too hard to write
a script to update marks in one direction or ther other, though.


paul