I've seen this idea several times, and I always have the same question - how
would we deal with index/cache synchronization? One of the reasons I'm still
using MH/exmh is because the one message per file paradigm means that you can
do interesting things with regular Unix commands - except if you screw up and
use /bin/mv or /bin/rm rather than refile and rmm, you end up with the index no
longer matching reality.
Well, you already have that issue with sequences, so I don't see this as a
new problem. It's a lot more visible, though. If you're willing to live
with "almost 100% accurate" you can go a long way just by comparing the
index/cache file mod times with the directory mod time. If you consider
the messages to be immutable (which they are, with the exception of anno
mucking about adding headers) the only thing that's really going to put
you out of sync is if something renumbers the files in the folder. And
since the only way that's likely to happen is with pack, the index/cache
would get updated with the new file names.
And as with the existing sequences imlementation, the only way you get
100% consistency is by making the message store a black box, at which
point it's no longer MH.
--lyndon
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