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

[David Levine]

Ken wrote:

> I was just wondering, since the sequence checking code was first in
> m_convert().  I just checked; if you create a numeric sequence by hand,
> yes, you totally can use it!

At your own peril.  It clearly violates the documentation.

> So the default case is you don't need the
> second call to folder_read().  I think what we should do here is:
>
> - If you don't give the -seq flag to pick, don't make the second call to
>   folder_read().

Here's an irrelevant observation, given that we don't want to remove
-seq at this point:  pick -seq has always bothered me a little as
being impure.  I would argue that the output of pick should be fed to
mark if you want to define any sequences.

> - Create a new option to control whether or not you want to maintain
>   a lock during the whole run of inc and pick.  I say default to NOT
>   having the lock during the full run of these commands and have two
>   calls to folder_read(); people with 100K+ messages in a single folder
>   could enable this flag.  I do not know what to call this flag; -fulllock?
>   Too many 'l's in a row, for one.
>
> What do others think?

Somehow that ended up backwards from what I think would be the goal,
which is to have only one folder_read() on large folders.  Would
this work:  add, and default to, -lock?  If a user trusts themself
to do only one operation at a time, and they want the speed, they
could use -nolock.

David