Re: [Nmh-workers] MH-W intro/help request

[Ken Hornstein]

>I was pondering a reply to his email.  I'm glad there exists a way
>(and will take advantage of it while shaking things out), but as a
>general rule I'd like whatever mechanisms I'm using to be robust
>and expected to continue to work in the reasonable future...  so
>yeah a more generic/known lasting mechanism would be nice.

One of my vague plans that I mentioned a while ago was to give mhlist the
ability to take an mh-format(5) program and give it access to information
from the message.  But I haven't gotten around to implementing it ... maybe
in the future.

>What I use now is "mark -list -sequence unseen", which returns compressed
>lists of messages (i.e. "1-5,7-8" instead of "1 2 3 4 5 7 8").  Parsing
>this to intersect it with my pick output is relatively fast, though it
>is of course ineligant compared to getting *just* the list you want.  It
>is also surprisingly slow (like 1/7th of a second to get this vs. other
>MH programs which run 10x or more faster).  I don't really understand why
>it is so slow, since it is a near character-for-character copy of the
>one line that the .mh_sequences file has in it.  If it wasn't so very
>slow compared to the other MH programs, I probably would not have even
>brought it up for now.

You know, I just took a look at it; it should not be slow, actually,
unless you're running into things like lock contention for the sequence
file.  It does the same things every other MH program does (it calls
folder_read()) but then it does very little after that.  Could you
do a system call trace and try to figure out what's taking so long?

--Ken