On 24 Oct 2013, at 20:51, Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:
For anyone who's looking to implement something new, I think that
git's internal architecture might be a good starting place, written
in C. In slightly related news, I looked at notmuch recently, and
it made me miss MH.
I've heard that before, but I don't see how looking at git helps
anything here.
You're probably right; you're a lot more familiar with the code and the needs
of MH+IMAP than I am.
If the issue is about conflict resolution, git's
ultimate answer when things get complicated is "punt it to a human",
just like every other revision control system out there. I don't think
we want that when dealing with a set of mailbox changes (in my view,
git's magic is how it manages sets of changes).
Hashing of the message contents really helps make git not rely as much on the
semantics of file names, and this is where I thought that git's approach might
be most interesting.
Beyond that, email messages are generally large (compared to calendar entries,
anyway) collections of text. Changes to messages mostly involve small deltas to
metadata. Managing changes to changes to changes based on revisions and times
isn’t trivial, but a lot of the automation (conceptually) has already been
written.
Compared to this, notmuch 'just' indexes everything as fast as it can, and then
relies on heuristics and a human to know when to manually invalidate the
database.
Hope that helps,
~Chad
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