Re: [Nmh-workers] indexing

[Paul Vixie]

> From: Ken Hornstein <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2011 22:04:07 -0500
> 
> Glad to see you're still using nmh, Paul!

i'm on the fence at the moment, but giving it my best shot.

> So, when people talk about integrating nmh and IMAP, there are two distinct
> problems that people want to attack (AFAICT):
> ...
> As I understand it, what you want to solve is 1).  I personally
> wouldn't find that useful myself (because the IMAP server I would
> use wouldn't have access to my nmh mailboxes), but certainly plenty
> of people have asked about doing that, and I'm all for making nmh
> more useful to people.  Also, I don't think that doing 1) precludes
> doing 2).

it would not, although proper imap server side support for an mh message
store would go a long way toward making it reasonable to run mh as an imap
client.  (that is, i don't imagine i would enjoy using MH as a client via
imap to a remote message store that wasn't MH, though stranger things have
happened.)  the big problem with (2) is the same impedence mismatch as with
(1), and that is: sortm must never be used since IMAP UID's must persist.

> So, from what I understand this would require modifications to the IMAP
> server, right?  To know about these indexes?  As long as you've got the
> IMAP server vendors on board, then I guess I don't see any issues with
> that at all.  Sounds like a great idea to me, and it sounds like it's
> actually doable without a huge amount of work.
> 
> What do others think?

i'm happy for this initial warm reaction.  one of the implications is that
we have to install a library that uw-imap and dovecot can link to, whereas
mh and nmh have always linked statically against the 'sbr' shared code base.
and if we're going to do that we should be thinking about whether we ought
to put some/most of 'sbr' into that library and link to it dynamically.  has
this been discussed in the past and if so what's the common thinking about it?

paul

ps. that's funny about your wife recognizing my name.