Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh in near, medium, and far-term

[Paul Vixie]

On 12/6/2011 7:57 PM, Ken Hornstein wrote:
> ... in terms of shared library support we have two options: libtool
> and hand-written code for each operating system. I'm not interested in
> working on the latter, but if someone else wants to work on it I won't
> stand in the way. If there are other options, then I'd like to hear
> about it....

the current (younger than me) ISC team uses and seem to love libtool,
for whatever that's worth.

>
>> if MH supported Maildir format folders i could use it again. (i've
>> switched to pure IMAP, on a Maildir folder store, after more than 20
>> years of straight MH userhood. painful but necessary.) but there's no
>> way to abstract out the code that understands MH format unless we're
>> moving all of it into a reusable code library.
> Hm.  Okay, so I've only peripherally looked at maildir in the past.  I
> took a quick look at it now.  Some questions for you:
>
> - I assume you're using Dovecot, and as a result you want the Dovecot
>   extensions (specifically the ones about folders).  Correct?

i am using dovecot, yes, but i don't know what its extensions are. the
dovecot people are smart and their code is BSDL not GPL so i'm inclined
to say, if they like it we'll like it, and maybe we can even depend on
their libraries.

> - Do you just want to be able to have "scan" and "show" work?  Or do you
>   want to do more complicated things?  Just trying to get an idea of the
>   functionality that is useful to you.

i want it all.

[ss:amd64] du -k Maildir | tail
3       Maildir/.Archives.2011/tmp
17      Maildir/.Archives.2011/cur
3       Maildir/.Archives.2011/new
48      Maildir/.Archives.2011
3       Maildir/tmp
3       Maildir/.Junk E-mail/tmp
3       Maildir/.Junk E-mail/cur
3       Maildir/.Junk E-mail/new
14      Maildir/.Junk E-mail
428869  Maildir

if Mail does not exist but Maildir does, then i'd like scan, inc, show,
repl, rmm, rmf, refile, pick, and so on to all work the same for me as
they did when everything was in MH format.

i don't think it's practical to abstract the message and folder handling
out so far that MH's front end could ever be a useful IMAP interface,
nor an interface to "Berkeley Mail" style folders. but Maildir is darn
similar to what MH does now.

>
> And for everyone else:
>
> - For those of you who care about this, do you have any thoughts about how
>   a mapping from an MH message number to a particular Maildir filename
>   would work?  At first glance that's the thing that leaps out at me
>   as the most obvious problem without a simple solution.

agreed, this is the major thing that stops UW-IMAP from being a good MH
back end, too. i suspect that we'll be building a .db (or .dir/.pag)
file per folder that maps the UIDL from the Maildir file name to a
static number, so that things like "pack" and "sortm" can still have
useful work to do.