Jason Helfman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Thu, 31 Aug 2000:
> To have new/ tmp/ cur/ for every mailing list?
So what? It's 3 extra dirs, it's not like any modern computer will
likely run out of inodes or disk space with current disk sizes...
Normally, it's all hidden by the application anyway.
> What are the advantages to this...
Other than what's been listed, Maildirs also allow for each per-message
handling by external scripts. You don't need to detect message
boundaries like in mbox. For some situations, that's a big
simplification. But if you don't tend to write your own tools (scripts,
perl stuff, etc. etc.) then you likely won't care. But I would consider
it an advantate of Maildirs, in a general sense...
And oh, deleting or otherwise modifying a message from/in a large
Maildir folder is fast, whereas from mbox if you delete the first
message the whole file has to be re-written. On average, half of the
folder has to be re-written back to disk (of course, you usually
operate on the last few messages, so statistically it might not be
even half...) But this is contrasted by the slower opening time for
large Maildir folders, as compared against mbox.
Overall, I'd say the NFS/no-locking issue is the biggest and perhaps
only reason which should be considered for a normal user, when choosing
whether to use Maildir or not.
Regards,
Mikko
--
// Mikko Hänninen, aka. Wizzu // [EMAIL PROTECTED] // http://www.iki.fi/wiz/
// The Corrs list maintainer // net.freak // DALnet IRC operator /
// Interests: roleplaying, Linux, the Net, fantasy & scifi, the Corrs /
"Attitude is more important than reality"
