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
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