On 26 Oct 2013, at 20:05, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon(_at_)orthanc(_dot_)ca> wrote:
On Oct 26, 2013, at 7:11 PM, Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:
Beyond that, email messages are generally large (compared to calendar
entries, anyway) collections of text. Changes to messages mostly involve
small deltas to metadata.
Note that messages in IMAP are immutable; we don't have to worry about
changes to a message.
And thanks for quoting that previous text. I got a bit aggressive with the
delete key and lost the message I was going to reply to :-P
I think that we've got some cross-talk going on here; and it's probably my
fault for jumping into a popular topic. I was suggesting looking at git and
notmuch for ideas and *perhaps* code for implementing something much farther
away from nmh 1.5 than 1.6 or 1.7. I'd hope that the user commands would be
compatible, but the internals (and especially the file-system layout) wouldn't
necessarily match at all. In that (highly theoretical) world, I explicitly
don't care that nmh relies on the filesystem structure in some places and not
others. For example, when I was talking about small deltas, I was imagining a
design where the metadata that nmh accesses through the filesystem, sequences
files, etc all move into the mail store - while remaining primarily plain text
in a filesystem (hence git).
In similar fashion, since I'm not talking about implementing an IMAP server
(did it once, mostly in perl: never again), I don't know why I'd care about the
server's restrictions on file storage. Perhaps you're thinking about building a
mail store that you share with an imap server? I dunno; I'm clearly not on the
same page. :-)
It's been a long time since I learned or implemented a network protocol from an
RPC, probably ~10 years. I'm not really qualified to debate whether or not MH
can be simplified enough to map directly to a plain IMAP server, but ~12 years
ago the answer really seemed to be `no'. At the same time, I make hourly use of
macosx's Mail.app, ios' mail app, google web interface, and a 3rd-party ios
mail client on 3+ devices across 7 imap accounts, 5 gmail and 2 others. It
works, mostly - well enough to get by, but not well enough that I don't miss MH.
Thanks for letting me ramble, and especially thanks for keeping MH alive!
~Chad
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