Re: performance respooling articles in nnmbox or nnbabyl

[larsi@ifi.uio.no (Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen)]

gsstark@MIT.EDU (Greg Stark) writes:

> The problem is that nnmbox and nnbabyl use a single file for all the
> groups and use the Gnus-* headers to indicate which group an article
> is in.  To refile an article, all that's necessary is to change the
> header, in theory.

Some header munging also has to be done to remove all those babyleze
headers.

> If it just went through and editted the headers for each article it
> would only have to move the gap over each article once in sequence,
> the equivalent of a single movement over the entire buffer.  In
> other words it should run in order N time.  If there's no clean way
> to get this behaviour without breaking the abstraction barriers (it
> looks like it shouldn't be too hard to me) then another order N
> algorithm would be to process all the deletions first then insert
> all of them at the end.

But you're only considering the particular case of respooling between
nnbabyl and nnmbox (and possibly nnfolder).  You're probably right
that Gnus does far too much work when moving messages between those
backends, but it's hard to see how to do what you suggest between,
say, nntp and nnml cleanly without adding a gazillion new functions.
(Each backend now only has to provide two functions to move, accept,
copy and respool articles -- `nn*-request-move-article' and
`nn*-request-accept-article'.)  The added complexity does not justify
the speed increases, which I'm not convinced would happen, actually.

(I don't know anything about those buffer gaps and stuff, though.  Why
do the gaps have to move?  Point stays at the end of the buffer being
respooled to, I think...)

Oh.  Uhm.  I misunderstood.  You meant respooling using the same
backend?  Those backends assume that the messages are stored using
ascending article numbers, so just changing the Gnus-* headers won't
work reliably.  In any case, that's not something most people would do
very often.

-- 
  "Yes.  The journey through the human heart 
     would have to wait until some other time."