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On Friday, September 4 at 06:27 PM, quoth Chris G:
>>>> - reading/writing/moving/deleting messages is faster than opening
>>>> an mbox, looking for the right message, editing it, then
>>>> rewriting the whole mbox.
>>>>
>>> Possibly faster for a *program* to do but not so easy for a
>>> person to do directly.
> I was referring to re-arrangement of mailboxes in particular, not
> editing of message,
... perhaps I'm not understanding you, then. Why is 'mv' slower for
Maildir than it is for mbox? On most Unix systems, it's the exact same
operation (modify a dirent).
> anyway when does one want to edit messages, it's not something I've
> ever wanted to do.
Sometimes comes in handy if you're using email messages as notes to
yourself or if you have a corrupt one you want to correct or if you
want to test an email parsing tool you're writing... that sort of
thing.
>>> Depending on what/who created the maildir hierarchy you may
>>> find it virtually impossible to move directories (which aren't
>>> real directories) and mailboxes around.
>>
>> Why not?
>>
> Because *lots* of them create maildirs which aren't real directories
> but use '.' as a delimiter. For example I have:-
[snip]
> Mail/holidays/2009/sarthe
>
> Where bikeRide and sarthe are the actual mailboxes (with others on the
> other branches of course).
>
> Many maildir creators (most of the maildir+ ones I believe) in reality
> create the above as:-
[snip]
> Mail.holidays.2009.sarthe
I fail to see how this makes renaming or moving the sarthe mailbox
"virtually impossible".
> So all the mailboxes are at the same level with names with embedded
> dots, if you want to move mailboxes up and down the hierachy it is
> rather difficult.
Meh. First of all, if I'm using mutt, I can use whatever mail folder
layout I want. Second, if I'm using the Maildir++ layout as described,
it's usually because I'm using IMAP, which works the exact same way.
Third, it's not that hard to rename multiple things with a little
shell knowledge. For example:
for F in Mail.holidays.2009.* ; do
mv "$F" "${F/.2009/}"
done
But I suppose that all depends on your definition of "rather
difficult".
> I note you haven't questioned my comment that maildirs are difficult
> to delete safely! :-)
They're only difficult to delete "safely" if you're expecting them to
get recreated at any moment. And that's only true if you need an
algorithm that doesn't impose arbitrary naming restrictions. If you're
allowed to do this:
mv maildir ..maildir_deletemeXXXXXXXX
rm -rf ..maildir_deletemeXXXXXXX
...then it's not difficult (as long as mv is atomic, which it usually
is).
~Kyle
- --
Conscience frequently errs from invincible ignorance without losing
its dignity.
-- Gaudium et spes
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